Will to Power

I forgot to say that the word "understanding" already has a connotation of "compassion". This, I think, is also why Strauss chose to translate noesis as "understanding":

"Philosophy, we have learned, must be on its guard against the wish to be edifying--philosophy can only be intrinsically edifying. We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noeseos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God. This experience is entirely independent of whether what we understand primarily is pleasing or displeasing, fair or ugly. It leads us to realize that all evils are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding. It enables us to accept all evils which befall us and which may well break our hearts in the spirit of good citizens of the city of God. By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or as uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind." (Strauss, "What Is Liberal Education?")

Strauss was Jewish, so he may very well have been thinking of Binah.

Saying this is a pleasure of cruelty is missing the point. One takes pleasure in truth, and often truth is destructive. One feels one’s errors rising into consciousness and then falling away, replaced by “understanding”. At least this is how it is for me.

I’ve written most of the content of my two books in moments of intense suffering. I mean the most intense and pointless and unbearable suffering imaginable, much of the time, to the point where I literally felt like I was dissolving at times. That is what forced me to write. I was only able to create a philosophical mind due to his necessity to write to deal with suffering. The “pleasure” had nothing to do with being cruel, it was a simple survival necessity. It felt good to attack pointless suffering with truth and watch truth kick the shit out of that suffering, that’s what it was for me, that’s what the pleasure is. I suppose you can call that “cruelty” if you want, but the concept doesn’t really encapsulate the experience.

I don’t think philosophy is undertaken because it is pleasurable or not, I think it is pleasurable or not because it is (must be) undertaken for other reasons. Those other reasons, which are a cold hard necessity having to do with brutal survival need as a kind of compulsion that cannot be resisted without subjecting oneself to almost immediate dissolution, that is the “why we do philosophy”. At least for me. The fact that this intensity has spread out a little in space and time now does not disprove this causality one bit, it’s still absolutely vital to and for me to continue to philosophize. Because without it “I” would quickly cease existing.

Philosophizing is self-valuing. All pleasure, as cruelty or genuine happiness of understanding or anything else, is secondary. Sometimes philosophizing comes with causing us pleasure, sometimes it comes with causing us pain, sometimes it comes with causing us neither pleasure nor pain. That’s why I’m saying those feelings (and by extension the tendencies to sentiments of philanthropy or misanthropy) don’t really matter. At least not to me.

Yes how you act toward others will to a degree and in certain cases reflect your philosophy, but it isn’t nearly as clear cut as that. If you want to know about a thinker’s philosophy, just read their philosophy.

Damn proud of this thread.

Pezer wrote:

Damn proud of this thread.

Yeah I'm still thinking of turning it into a book.

For the record, I told Sauwelios he is welcome provided that he writes more than he quotes. As we can all see, this works out for the better. Much more is being said in this way. Scholars are very careful men that don't risk their necks. Ive known Sauwelios as a risk-taker though. And Ive seen him get beaten for it as happens to all of us. I am proud to be vindicated in my trust in his... swordsmanship.


I pick up three cardinal points:
- The Logic is the fire-logos of Heraclitus, or even what H was merely on to (now that is honour)
- It removes the need for Platonism, it replaces the surrogate Idea of which so much was born that Nietzsche fatally wounded.
- The experience of what we understand as suffering through error (or more dramatically sin, evil) implies that there is a fixed standard against which we rigorously measure the outcome of acts and decisions, and the notion of this standard has been pushed forth and developed by the Platonists.



Indeed, it in the Logos then that we recognize this standard which is ever elusive and still consistent in terms of its outcome -
this consistency is what we know of it, and in as far as we suppose there is "something that" "has" this consistency, we refer to it a self-valuing.

The idea in itself is not a standalone concept. It is only understood in terms of the most personal experiences.
This is of course why it leads in the first years to gruesome war and diamond alliances.

The Pentad is a diamond. We should make a Platonic solid out of it.

Fate: as for my my life this whole philosophy is the organism itself, I am become helplessly a part of it. So there lies the root of my fanatical will to bind together somehow the geniuses of so far and apart qualities and taste. I know this philosophy commands a "circle of friends", very much like Arthurs round table, as of course the Logos is akin to the Grail.

First the logos was the grail, now that the logos is found the grail-quest extends itself further like the race for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The telos has become the implementation of the logos -
and we are seeing how wrong I was as Plato was wrong to assume that it can be formally taught.
It must brought out, drawn out, like blood.

Wrong if I really thought this, which I did not so perhaps neither did Plato, but I did know that formal teaching must be part of the education.
What I realized instantly is that power commands, and primarily it command the one who wields it. So folly was inevitable. A balancing act on the edge of a volcano, I can't say I feel this is just a metaphor. I am scorched and lightheaded from breathing truth-risk.

I had no choice, the logic drew me into an ordeal. From the ordeal came the music. What can only be born of the spirit of this music is a new Heroism, and with this the work folds into the philosophy of Parodites so as to realize its summits somehow on Earth. Somehow, as only the moment will decide the occasion.

Hail Nietzsche
thank astrology

Invicta really means  only ever conquered by the worthy.
It naturally doesn't mean untouched but quite the opposite; "the sacred dirt of centuries, my blood wants to stick to her"

Conquer Rome and we shall admit to your existence.
- the Gods

"the goal makes the man"
the gold makes the goal more shiny and the path lighter
but the head heavier

a man with a goal is a winged creature
a man with untold regrets can not have a goal.

Paris was carved from a white mountain by the erosion of tears from the gods.
Regrets are fine as long as you really have them.

q:

DIKAIOPOLIS: I hate the truth in every sense of the word. The only thing I like about it is that it is nowhere to be found.

RHAPSODOS: We are sailing on a red wine-sea, on a hollow ship, a black ship

SOKRATES:

SOKRATES: Don't you mean wine-red sea, dear poet for you are a genius and such genius would never say something that isn't utterly the best and clearly what I said is the best, is it not?

RHAPSODOS: When do we arrive in Piraeus?

The writer wrote:

In full, the finished play:

DIKAIOPOLIS: I hate the truth in every sense of the word. The only thing I like about it is that it is nowhere to be found.

RHAPSODOS: We are sailing on a red wine-sea, on a hollow ship, a black ship

SOKRATES: Don't you mean wine-red sea, dear poet for you are a genius and such genius would never say something that isn't utterly the best and clearly what I said is the best, is it not?

RHAPSODOS: When are we in Piraeus?

BOATSWAIN: Hohop-hop, hophop-hop....

DIKAIOPOLIS: Go on and don't listen to that dreary talkish fellow. Come on and sing some more stories for us, for it is still a long voyage home. Have some wine by Zeus!

RHAPSODOS: By Zeus I shall have some wine... now where was I.... the wine-red sea, a black ship, a hollow ship and the boatswain says "hophop-hop, hohop-hop."

Socrates was the first leftist. Fuck him.

He had no concept whatsoever for the fact that one could have either good or bad motives, when it comes to philosophy and to truth (and when it comes to life in general). This is why his stupid formulation "knowledge is the only good, ignorance is the only evil" exists, and has fucked up humanity ever since those words were uttered. What is glaringly missing from that formulation is reference to this fact of motivation, to one's purpose and attitude and honesty and reasons when it comes to one's actions, interactions, thinking, and philosophizing.

I might change it to, "Honest motives and engagement is the only good, lack of honest motives and engagement is the only evil". Obviously Socrates falls into the latter of those two groups.

Socrates, the first democrat.

well, yes. 
I do however take some pleasure in dismantling all of Platonism because of having replaced their object petit a with a reality.

Anyway this chemistry here is all fucking wrong.
This is the  time where Sokrates' final downfall is being prepared.

Let's get violent.

The aim is not to fit life into theory so as to conclude that it does, after all, make sense.
Well that is nice to be able to do but I already did that even without having the fucking aim.

Plato isn't even an ant compared to me.

Im hurting my head trying to discern the motions of all these tiny critters. 
But this goes for most aspects of human life.

I look forward to what comes. The future is my territory.

She gives me a birthday present

Yes damn that photo is really good.

SocRATes is indeed going to... fade away. As he properly wanted, based on his deep self-resentment and war against the earth.

Thrasymachus wrote:

Yes damn that photo is really good.

SocRATes is indeed going to... fade away. As he properly wanted, based on his deep self-resentment and war against the earth.

The morning after my next birthday there will be a gigantic bloodmoon rising.
On the picture the blood-moon hangs above the temple of Poseidon.

I was there a few years ago.



One of the three most sacred places in Europe.
The others being APOLLONs Delphi:



and the temple of ZEUS which I did not dare nor wish to photograph. 

HAIL ZEUS

"Once one has comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has, fortunately, also comprehended something else: the futility, apparentness, absurdity, and mendaciousness of such a revolt. A condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem. When we speak of values, we speak with the inspiration, with the way of looking at things, which is part of life: life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values. From this it follows that even that anti-natural morality which conceives of God as the counter-concept and condemnation of life is only a value judgment of life — but of what life? of what kind of life? I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned life. Morality, as it has so far been understood — as it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as "negation of the will to life" — is the very instinct of decadence, which makes an imperative of itself. It says: "Perish!" It is a condemnation pronounced by the condemned."

--Nietzsche

I don't really hate xstians though, or xstiainity. At least something good lives through them, to somewhat invert Nietzsche's statement above. Indeed, if the will to life is as he describes, then how much more so could be the will to... afterlife!

Ahaha.

Yes, Nietzsche perhaps underestimated the intensity of the willing behind the terms, and even underestimated his own meaning with that line of his above. "life itself values through us when we posit values". Life here is the actor, the "meta", the "meme" that lives off the actions it can secondarily induce in its host... but what does life value? How could Nietzsche pretend to understand such a question, when he has already said so clearly that a perspective outside of life is impossible? Well maybe we do not know the value of life, but we can observe life and learn something of what it values, right?

But if we know what life values, as well as what it does and acts out on those values, cannot we begin to form the value of life?

No, even here the value of life escapes us. So too then, could the value of afterlife also escape us? How necessary have imaginary fiends and the bonds between people who have them, been for the development of something we can actually call civilization or culture? And how fucking rare is that, that we actually have something that we can name like that? No matter how many times the surface structures collapse upon our western civilizational project, its foundations always remain and end up rebuilding new structures. Is the afterlife not some kind of weird will to power, a necessary counter-point to the immense pressure, depth and compactness of the uncollapsing civilizational foundation?

Thrasymachus wrote:

 Is the afterlife not some kind of weird will to power, a necessary counter-point to the immense pressure, depth and compactness of the uncollapsing civilizational foundation?  

This is a very nice angle.
I can work with that. 

Especially since in our foundational myths there are some elements of such afterlives as could be desirable to a human in the culture carrying forth that myth. An afterlife is like a preserve for foundational values that can't yet be directly attained. Similarly, Israel is as I recently figured is the afterlife of all Jews that came before it. The promised land, the promise kept. It was, apparently, a sound promise.

Makes me wonder what other promises that book makes.

individualized wrote:

Fixed said elsewhere that God has become having true friends, and yes I agree that God has always been just a lack of true friends.

Philosophers can not be friends in the regular sense, they must be enemies in almost equal measure.
What breaks the enmity is only circumstance, truth. The ways of power.
"Politics will have another meaning"

All Hail the Uebermensch, Son of Kek.
No not all. Half of mankind will not be able to see it, as it blinds them to view the Sun.

Apo Pantos Kakodaimonos!

Before the Light, before the light
sheesh, you gave us quite a fright
hold on tight, hold on tight
where you gonna sleep tonight

oars in the deep
the black ships came
octopi, creatures with several brains,
were the last thing seen
before the light