Lampertian Nietzscheanism and related matters.

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Eros within chaos: Dionysus.

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Chaos within Eros: Ariadne.

Good, very good. It is so simple that I first overlooked it in the mesh of composite god-names; but this shows how dangerous woman truly is, and how utterly helpless she is in the face of it. A very moving definition!

I was just today committed entirely to the anima, when a thing so strange that no one would believe it if I wrote it down happened to a godhead I carry. It is convenient that I can now do this philosophically!

Okay. The first thing that strikes me is how noble then the first romantic ideal is, the spiritual initiative of the minstrels, the troubadours. Romantic, which was a local phenomenon of Platonic beauty-truth-good (Idea), versus Roman Catholic, which is a base-Platonic Universal (Ideal) of a monstrous monarchic will to power. It is phenomenal what the Church has conquered; the Church Fathers call the Church their Mother; they then are the chaos within that erotic facade! The pedophilia but god only knows what else kind of daemonic rituals of chaos she tolerate in herself, caring only for the sustenance she received from her grateful indulgers.

Such literally monstrous power fed of the bones and marrow of the European middle classes and reduced the to slaves of a universal morality; but in the meantime, in their name the religion that even superseded the Church when it split up through Luther (a whole other can of worms), the Caesaric impulse, aided by armies of bacteria this time, overran the Americas and settled a community that is now master of the globe. Alexander, Hail you young man! What a cute little devil he was... I saw him playing in the garden with that snake.... as his mother encouraged him to ride the tigers of chaos.

Cha-os - that summer night, I remember the math book and the english reader for the exams on the table, underneath a cover of Blake prints and poems. Either Vincent or the Doors were playing. It was all before Father Turkey came into the equation.  A different world-web with many threads between poet and muse.

Signifying nothing, that experience signified what it tried for; indispensable youth, "possession and distribution of the Eleusian mysteries" - Taurus Scorpio axis of Amsterdam. Chao-Os! Once more. X - ! Now order. "Order in Russia!" Two men creating time cried out in vain. The Dark Mother, Bitter Sea, X in O, "Cha-cha".

The point is now to recognize how courageous the impulse to directly approach each other as man and woman, rather than under the guise and banner of an oikonomic structure that designates fortunes and progeny, and most of all secures that madness does not come to rule the proceedings.

Those minstrels invited madness to guide the agency of reproduction. Or rather they released the original madness from its civilizing chains. A Dionysos was born then, when the Apollo of the heart (musical lyrics!) had grown strong enough.

Thank Ovid! His legacy lives on in Rock music while Plato and Caesar live cramped in the Pentagon. It is through old hippies that she will come to the west, the mother of all destinies; Victory over her founding instinct by the instinct it tried to repress!

Victory of master-morality over slave morality at the end of a song; as the tragic epos of haronies and contra harmonies culminates into a chaotic rage, the perpetual mantra just stops. When repetition loses faith, difference is truly born.

The King is dead. Long live the Sword. So that it may open the halls of music to the Caesar! Oh Asia, she still awaits.........

Sauwelios wrote:

While thinking about what to post next in the third Pentad cycle, I was reminded of this thread:

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2109300#p2109300 (Note that it seems that, in Part V, I meant to write "if the war hallows the cause rather than vice versa".)

The "great problem" that dawned upon me then now suggests itself to me as a solution. I need to reflect on this...

I may have found a solution to the problem. The problem, as I formulated it back then, is this:

"[T]he problem is that, once this war ['the good war which halloweth every cause'] is victorious, it defeats its own end, as Morgan says. For if the [war] hallows the [cause] rather than vice versa, the 'end' is the means, and the 'means' is the true end. Thus even if only for the sake of the good war, the cause ought not to be peace, contentedness, moral virtue, etc. But it cannot be the opposite, either! For then it would cancel itself out: by waging a war for war, for instance, one immediately attains one's end. The result would be an infinite series of infinitely short wars... No, the 'end' cannot be the true end. One cannot fight a war for war."

A war for war would be a particular kind of war, whereas the war for which it would be waged would be war in general. In other words: in the phrase "war for war", the first instance of the word "war" refers to a particular kind of war (namely to a war for war, and not for example a war for land), whereas the second instance refers to war in general.

If I start a war for war, then the cause is immediately victorious. As soon as there is a war for war, there is war. But the same does not apply if the second instance of the word "war", the war for which war is waged, is itself also of a particular kind. It's not necessarily the case that, as soon as I start a war for war for peace, there is war for peace. The cause is not immediately victorious, and may never be victorious.

I could start a war with the hopes of inciting others to wage a war for peace against me. I could pretend that my war is a war for land, when it's really a war for war for peace. As soon as my war then elicits a war for peace, my cause is victorious. But this is not what I propose. I do not propose a war for war for peace. I propose a war for eternal war.

Eternal war need not be a war for any particular cause. It is, however, a particular kind of war. A war for eternal war will not be victorious as soon as it's started. In fact, if the goal of eternal war is only attained by the war for eternal war directly, it's only attained insofar as war is waged for it. Only if the war for eternal war rages on eternally is its cause victorious. "By waging an eternal war for eternal war, one immediately attains one's end"...

I mean "war" in a broad sense here--basically in the sense of "striving". And in the coming weeks, months, or years, I wish to apply my newfound solution to as many different forms as possible of the problem--which, from 2009 or 2010 onward, has for me become the philosophical problem.

One of those forms is my conception of Nietzsche's concept of the Superman. More and more it seemed to me that, the more a person strives for supermanhood, the more "superhuman" he becomes. (Not striving in an impatient, feverish, impetuous way, but in a controlled, manly kind of way.) Thus on the first page of this thread, I quoted myself as saying:

"I think nothing is as conducive to supermanhood, in the Nietzschean sense, as the striving for it (with the intended suggestion of 'strife'). But this means that the end is best attained in the very means to that end; that the cause is best served in the very fight for that cause. If the Superman is best found in the fight, then the cause of that fight cannot be the Superman, for then the Superman is in the fight rather than beyond it, at the end of it. This is the philosophical problem I'm reflecting on these days."

I now propose the following solution to this problem. The Superman is not the man who strives for supermanhood. He is not even, as I first defined him somewhere between 2001 and 2003, the man who wills the eternal recurrence; that to me is now only the Nietzschean philosopher-lawgiver, and not the Homeric, Platonic, or Machiavellian. The Superman, as I conceive him now, is the eternally recurring philosopher-lawgiver. Not Homer, but the eternal recurrence of Homer--or, if history never end, the historical recurrence of Homer, of Plato, of Nietzsche...

Nature is history. This does not mean that nature is no more--for the present shall be the history of the future--, but that the end of history would be the end of nature. Let us therefore make history! Let us strive to eternalize history, to create a new demand for it by the terrible beauty of our rendition of it. Let us be politicians by being erotic historians!

If the Superman is the eternally recurring man who strives for supermanhood, then striving for supermanhood means striving for eternal recurrence. As Georg Picht, in a passage I just now happened to read, says about "the will to the Superman which is active in man":

"What is willed in this will is that transcendence which in 'historical philosophy' steps into the place of metaphysical transcendence, transcendence into the historic future which is to be designed by ourselves. The concept 'Superman' only becomes understandable when one comprehends that it paraphrases the concept of 'trans-scendence' and transposes it into the domain of thinking of History. With that, transcendence is turned around the axis which lays within man. Now the surmounting does not become successful in eternity but in the future." (Picht, Nietzsche, page 357, my translation.)

Here's something I wrote elsewhere last week:

"What kind of being, what kind of individual do I want to be most dearly? A Superman as I currently understand him: an eternally recurring man-who-strives-for-supermanhood... But if the eternal recurrence is not a fact, it's extremely unlikely that I could make it a fact. Therefore, I'm going for historical recurrence--eternal historical recurrence, if possible. [...] My teaching is the Plato-Nietzsche cycle, or the Homer-Plato-Machiavelli-Nietzsche cycle--the teaching of the four ages, ages I consider sublime enough for their recurrence to be desirable. Homer was complemented by Hesiod, Plato by Aristotle (or Socrates by Plato and Aristotle), Machiavelli by Bacon and Descartes, and who knows, Nietzsche by Strauss and--myself? (And of course there may be quite a few others, like I haven't even mentioned Hobbes, Locke, etc.)"

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"When I defined the Superman as 'an eternally recurring man-who-strives-for-supermanhood', I followed that definition with three periods, because it contains a self-reference and is thereby absurd. It's absurd because it would mean the Superman is an eternally recurring {man who strives to be an eternally recurring {man who strives to be etc.etc.}} But what I mean is this. A man who strives for supermanhood is only successful insofar as he eternally recurs. Therefore, he has to strive for the eternal recurrence of his type--the man who strives for supermanhood. Only insofar as he's successful at achieving this is he a Superman. Genuine philosophers are relative Supermen because they achieve the historical recurrence of their type: thanks to Homer and Hesiod, for example, the Physiologoi and the Sophists could flourish--until it became necessary for Socrates and Plato to devise and implement a new strategy. Well then, we now stand at an unprecedented fork in the road: we can make a recurrence of the whole history of philosophy from Homer to ourselves possible; or we can make it impossible, let the fulfillment or perversion of the Machiavellian strategy become complete, let the end of history arrive..."