I hope you are ready by then to actually post *the* paper you had diligently typed out; its only a guess, but all my intuition says, this one above is not *it*...
If you want a study, I can recommend a book. If you want a discussion, you can answer the questions in my post.... do a lil typing off the top of your head. It'll be refreshing after pasting so much holy scripture.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
If you want a study, I can recommend a book. If you want a discussion, you can answer the questions in my post.... do a lil typing off the top of your head. It'll be refreshing after pasting so much holy scripture.
Let's delve into this 'mother' and see what we find....
It all comes back to that old lollipop monism, and that mind/body divide. The path of self-recognition is the path from noumenon disconnected, to phenomenon, source. God being that unity of mind/body as whole becomnig. Essentially mind is the experience of what body represents: (inter)active, fluidity. The mind focused outward, must then (re)turn to discover self: the process of self-discovery, knowing self, is this re-connection of mind with the source, body, as if body were something alien to it. To turn back, into self; to Know Thyself
Here we find three types of mind: 1)those that (re)cognize body as the source of mind, and embrace it, 2) those who are unable to reconnect, because they've inherited inferior genes, and must remain on that primitive animal state where seeing your own reflection is an incredible discovery, and then 3) there are those cowards, those pathetic weaklings, who having recognized a piece of self, having glimpsed the tip of the iceberg, are terrified and disappointed by the implications, forcing them to regress, to revert, to turn away...this is nihilism folks. Away from self....as in outward...dissolution.
This mind/body divide, this schizophrenia, Freud realized was produced by the necessity for self-repression, we call civility or being civilized, and which results in neurosis, is what I've called noumenon/phenomenon. But I don't think he went far enough. This mind/body divide is the product of emerging consciousness, which must detach in order to come about, and which must then return to self. The metaphors in religion apply.
God...the ethereal, noetic, the idea(l). holy spirt...the movement towards, the (re)congition of phenomenon. the son, Jesus, the corporeal, the phenomenon....but with Christians something to escape in death...something to kill, or to allow to be sacrificed. Phenomenon = evil sin, dirty...noumenon is clean...eternal because time space do not, presumably, affect it.
Did not Plato have his own Jesus in Socrates? Are you with me so far? I've just repeated myself for the hundredth time.
Now here is where it gets interesting...for me.
This mind/body divide which most pretend to have overcome underlies all this bullshit these morons dish-out every so often to pretend they are thinkers. The words, symbols change, but the pungent stink of bullshit remains the same.
You can smell it in the Christian "soul" where consciousness, a reference to the mind, is eternal: in other words detached from phenomenon, and not bound by the world's limitations and determinations. Here's why the average imbecile refuses to accept that brain is what produces mind, or brain is the source, the phenomenon, and mind is the experience, the noumenon. For those idiots consciousness is something other than brain. Some believe the brain is the device "through" which this comic mind expresses itself. Then they can detach it from body altogether and claim that it is "out there". Can a bovine recognize itself reflected in the water? They refuse or are unable to connect the experience with the source of the experience, so as to integrate mind/body, because they are as dumb as bovines or they are cowards, unable to accept the implications. We'll get to those last.
So, "consciousness" is detached from brain, which simply means that mind is dislodged from brain, or noumenon is disconnected from phenomenon. This disconnection is, of course, reinforced by nihilistic systems that prefer docile easily manipulated bovines to thinkers.
And what is noumenon? Abstraction....yes. And abstraction is simplification/generalization...the interpretation of the fluid into a code, a static symbol. Indeed. And when detachment proceeds to a desirable level then one can claim the universe is a "thing", or discuss immanence and transcendence of a some-thing... Because the advantage of the noumenon is that it is not bound by phenomenal effects. It is without time or place...it may even be outside time/space. It can be no-where and every-where, no-thing or every-thing... It does not matter...it isn't matter. It is pure abstraction. A mental construct with no reference.
Like when they detach beauty form symmetry and fertility to comfort themselves with the idea that alllllll are beautiful, or can be so. A perfect example of how a concept, detached form reality, the noumenon dislocated from the phenomenon, becomes this noetic pacifier, this divine insinuation that can be anything, at any time for any one. and when done then why not make Beauty the source of existence...beauty beatifying itself through man. Use any noetic construct, or any idea detached form the phenomenon, then construct a hopeful, inspiring, comforting ideology around it...and be a shaman....like the VO crowd and their numerical cure of cancer.
Imagine...a system of symbols, referring to organic methods of interpreting fluidity would have an internal logic.... and this is "evidence" of a universal truth... How desperate can you be?
Every decade or so some pathetic imbecile replaces the word "conscious" with another word....love, justice, morality, that's a popular one, value, a more recent display of Jew-Christianity pretending to be Hellenic. Why can these idiots pretend to be Hellenic? Because in Greece all philosophical thought mingled...it being a crossroads between civilizations. The Greeks had variety of thinking - they were open to it - and we can still trace back our modern ideals to them. To the south Egypt, to the north their inherited pagan ancestors, to the east the Persians, Zoroastrianism, and through them Hinduism and Buddhism. To the west frontiers...and why westerners look west for inspiration. The Greeks settled westward....infecting the Romans, and then others. All found a place in Greece. And now these Semites can trace their own slavish, victim, thinking to the Greeks...Parmenides and Plato to be precise, with his ideals...the idea detached from the world. The Greeks were children....exploring openly. They could not imagine the sickly misery of the Semites to come later.
Did not Socrates, through the words of Plato return from war with a new discovery? Zalmoxis...as the eastern thinker fertilizing his mind with monism. Why did Socrates return to find that his words had been warped by brutes...turning them into tyrants? Simple, and you don't even have to read. Just look around here, and in ILP and witness what inferior minds have done to Satyr's words. Every douche-bag reads me and then imagines himself as a monster....a tyrant....a god.
Unable to grasp the meaning, ro deal with the insight, they run into extremes to cope with their own needs. Herein lies the root: NEEED.
What was Plato's realization, leading him to his philosopher kings elitism, and his understanding that most men were incapable of being thinkers, or honest ones, because most men were dominated by need, and feeling?
But I digress...
So, these imbeciles having rediscovered the mind/body divide, prefer the mind, the noumenon, obviously. Then you get the consciousness free of brain....the love free of survival purpose....the value free of judgment.... Any idiot can now substitute a word referring to a noetic experience, an intangible feeling, concept, dislodge it from its source and its survival purpose, and then present it as the "meaning of life".
You can use envy, hate, justice, and, why not, a number...a one or a nil. Preferably a more positive one...because positive nihilism needs this bait to make it palatable to the average cowardly dolt.
What is value free of judgment? Divine. Salvation.
Its easy....an easy way out of a realization. I alluded to it earlier. The realization that you are mortal, and that you will not live again. And for most, you will leave nothing behind....zero. In this culture these vain, arrogant, cowards cannot tolerate this realization...that a gnat will have more of an impact than they will confronts their ego. A retard might have ten kids...and it takes a true genius to leave behind an idea that will make him memorable...but these fucks will leave nothing....nada....zilch. No matter how great they think they are they will be worth shit, in the end. How devastating...to them.
A woman can remedy this easily. Go to any bar and you'll find some sperm-donor to pop-out ten kids...but a man? A man born into this system? A man unable to accept what is going on and why? A man inculcated with Modern nihilistic edumucation? A man unable to realize how paternalism was a good payoff for him? What does such a pathetic man have left when faced with oblivion?
One option is becoming effete intellectually...a means for another thinkers ends. A harder option is to rediscover a worn out nihilistic pony and ride him once more, like a child...yelling "I am god!!!"
This too needs no imagination. Just visit ILP. Just recently one man-child declared himself genius while his crew pranced about on Jesus' ass, claiming it was a steed: Value Ontology they had renamed their "new" ride. Value requiring no brain, no judgment...preceding all consciousness, in fact. Have you heard this sorry? Love, consciousness outside organism. Sound familiar?
Yes...others use another word..."pleasure" to the same effect. Once more the experience, the noumenon, the interpretation of the world (phenomenon), is declare the more real reality. The intangible sensation, the feeling, the abstraction with no reference point becomes a toy for desperate girls, but mostly desperate boys, wanting to leave a mark...because they are forgettable genetically and in every other way.
Is this harsh? Well so is reality!!!
There is a way to increase your options, but this requires facing reality, the phenomenon, and not figuring out clever ways to escape it, and to comfort yourself. It takes sacrifice...and still uncertainty looms.
But, they will say....my path is difficult not easy. Here is what I hinted at earlier, and will be finishing with. A Christian when accused of using absurdity as an easy comfort will claim that his faith is not easy but hard....real, real haaaaaaard. He will believe it too. But would they find it easier to look in the mirror, at their face, to (re)congize themselves, why they are this way and what brutal fate awaits them? They need only sacrifice reason and integrity to their hope...and in most of their cases there isn't much there to sacrifice. A dumb-ass has little to repress in society, and also little to sacrifice in the area of intelligence so as to attain the summit of his escape...which is no summit at all but a cave, a platonic subterranean abyss where he can rot away in shadows.
Same response is heard from these cowards... They do not deny how harsh reality is, but only that they've found a reason, a meaning, to make sense of their sacrifices, hoping that some meaning hides beneath it all, some value is there, some love, some eternity
If you cannot cope with the phenomenal world, feeling wronged, or insulted by it; if it does not gratify your vanity, and does not comfort your inability to appreciate and accept why someone as great, genius, incredible as you, will remain excluded from the gene pool, destined to be forgotten a few years after he dies; if you cannot integrate all this into your modernistically cultivated brain/mind, then, at least, do yourself a favor and never occupy yourself with matters you pretentiously call philosophy.
Go and have fun, indulge, distract...pleasure yourself...whatever...just don't delude yourself by calling what you do thinking.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Tue Jan 20, 2015 7:56 pm; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Pleasure is the negation of the sensation of need...as per Schopenhauer. He didn't deal with it correctly, but he was brilliant in his understanding of the world.
Aesthetics is the appreciation of what we long for or need. Our needs, what we lack, is what determines our tastes, our preferences.
If some can detach their noetic appreciation from this need, like a monk can detach his thoughts from his body, this does not make what determined them go away. The mind is still produced by the brain, even if the monk has noetically detached himself from it. In that moment of ecstasy, deep contemplation, orgasm, a similar moment of detachment occurs.
But the stimuli has already been determined as being what can trigger this. If the monk in his deep meditation remains unaware of the bear that will tear his fuckin' head off, this does not mean this monk immune to the fact that his mind is produced by his brain....and if the two shall separate no amount of deep thinking will save him. So, if I lose myself in a piece of music or a sculpture, this does not mean that the source of my appreciation has not already been determined, and what directs me to the possibility of losing myself for a while.
My taste for sugar and salt is already determined, and me surrendering to the pleasure of consuming these elements, as a product of my organic need, does not make my pleasure detach itself from the source. I lose myself, momentarily, I do not escape myself.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
A lion need not have an aesthetic understanding to have a taste. The lion surrenders to need/pleasure, because ti has no self-consciousness, no mind, to see itself acting... Does this make the organic need that determine its tastes, vanish?
No.
The particular form taste takes hints at an organic hierarchy...the particular organic organization, and its weaknesses. This is why I've said, that fantasies, the sexual kind in particular, are the best way to peak inside a mind's essence. It exposes the cultural symbols pointing to genetic balances...and what has been repressed, or has not been allowed to express itself fully.
It's why sharing fantasies, honestly, is such an intimate thing.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Need/Suffering is the sensation of Flux, for a self-organizing, conscious emergent unity. Taste is the sensual (re)cognition, in otherness, of what is required to correct, and/or cope, with this need. The form this taste takes, its direction to a particular object/objective is determined by environment. The promise for satiation can be symbolized, or represented by a manufactured or artificial object/objective. For example, pastry is a combination of different organic elements coveted by an organism to self-maintain. The organism need not perceive the ingredients separately, or understand why it has a taste for the ingredients, it only has to perceive their participation within the particular concoction. The particular organic hierarchies, internal organ relationships, will decide which element will be coveted the most by the specific organism. If it has a greater appreciation for sugar rather than for fat is determined by this particular cellular, organ arrangement. The form the food takes, is determined by culture. Whether sugar is included in one combination or another does not alter the fact that it is sugar which is needed.
Taste is determined by need. The preference for a particular source for acquiring this ingredient, its color, form, combination, style of presentation, is determined by culture. Prolonged habituation with the particular source for this element, and its specific inclusion within a combination, will establish the individual’s partiality.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Preference for one color over another is not some random event, or a matter of personal choice. Each color is the interpretation of a phenomenon’s particular essence, transmitted through a medium, and collected by a sense organ, which reduces it to a code to transmit it, through the neural network to the brain, where the stimulation is translated, using evolved methods of interpretation, into a form it can use. Color is the interpretation of a particular (inter)action, or a wavelength, a vibration. The subtle differences are generalized/simplified, by the brain, into broad shades that bleed into each other, but are part of a continuum from infrared to ultraviolet. These represent the perceptual-event-horizon of the species human.
Each vibration, hue, has a particular effect upon the sense organ but also the mind, where it is generalized/simplified, and then combined with internal stimuli, determined by the specific organism’s internal organ hierarchies. This internal structure, also transmitted and processed in the brain, mingles with the external stimuli, one of which is color, and in this mingling the mind is affected. The affect is then transmitted back, through the same neural pathways, to the entirety of the organism, influencing each cell, and the specific organ each cell is part of, in accordance with its vitality, and how it relates to the other organs. This entire process is what determines the particular organism’s preference for a specific vibration, and the psychosomatic stimulation it leads to.
You just post all the same bullshit in every thread without any concern for the subject, and honestly, it's not worth doing more than a quick skimming. Far from being worth addressing.
The particular internal organ hierarchies, coupled with the organism’s particular needs will determine the organism’s inclination, or aesthetic preferences. In taste, form, sound, texture, etc. each phenomenon will appear and will be interpreted as being a probable source of satiation, or if it not a probable source of satiation. In all this the acuity of sensual perception is also a factor. Two individuals may share a preference for green, or for a particular food combination, or for a specific style of music, but each will appreciate this on a different level. The more sensually acute will perceive variations in the color green, for instance, the other cannot, and so his preference will be more refined, more specific. What for his friend appear as similarly green for the more visually sensitive one will diverge, ever so subtly, so that he can discriminate where the other cannot do so. Another factor to consider is that whereas color is an interpretation of a phenomenon’s essence, along with all other sensual data the organism can perceive and process, the fact that the color can be altered, covered up, in our modern age, contributes to neurosis, and to this comforting delusion that appearances do not matter because they are changeable, and nobody can be certain that what appears ins naturally so or if it is artificially so.
What is blue, for instance, offering the phenomenon’s essence within the context of visually accessible stimuli, might be painted black. The specific factors in the past/nature, that determined the essence which is then interested as color – in combination with all the other sensually perceived datum – is intervened upon; masking this past/nature with an artificial coloration. This is also a part of Modernity’s matrix of artificiality. It buries essence in pretense. It hides nature/past by covering it over with human intervening imitations. It creates confusion, mass neurosis, but a comforting kind of neurosis – madness.
A need is never completely satiated, a need recurs infinitely, all satiation being merely temporary, a need is greedy, its lack, its emptiness, infinite, which betrays the fact that the concept of need is a misunderstanding, that there is no such a thing as need in reality, that what there is is a multiplicity of energies, on the level of mind a multiplicity of drives, pushing forward as much as they can. A need implies a lack, a room, an emptiness, to be filled, but no emptiness in reality exists. The concept of need derives from the necessity to employ restriction on overflowing energies which are selfish and greedy and which would end up destroying each other were they left on their own. A mechanism of self-control is put into place, an act of suppression is introduced, a concept of need is invented to be used as an indicator of which energies have been left unexpressed, in the newer terms suppressed, for too long.
A difference between neediness and indifference, although no indifference can possibly exist in reality if taken literally, is that neediness indicates a psychological state in which certain energies have been left unexpressed, suppressed, for too long, a sort of raw, bumpy and explosive expression of one's energies, whereas indifference implies a psychological state in which the brain cycles through energies in a very fast manner, like a computer cycling through its multiple processes, assigning a timeslice to each need, creating an illusion of simultaneous expression of needs, which is what we call integrity.
A great work of art -- we are talking about art here, right, not about aesthetics in general, aesthetics being a broader category -- expresses one's needs in a controlled, gentle and smooth manner -- in the so-called "indifferent" manner -- wheareas a poor work of art expresses them in a needy, vulgar sort of way. The smoothness with which one's needs are expressed, the indifference that is communicated, makes one appear devoid of any need, but this is a misunderstanding, merely a consequence of one's terrific level of self-control. This much a mother can be right, but a mother is not going this far, isn't she, she's going farther than this, she's implying a different sort of indifference, a Schopenhaurian sort of indifference, where decadence and covert neediness rule.
A need, an energy, lurks behind every act, and so it is when we appreciate a work of art aesthetically. This much a mother can admit. But a mother contends, and rightly so, that there is a difference between needs, that there is a state of neediness, a needy appreciation of art, and a state of indifference, an indifferent appreciation of art, and that art is more about the second than the first. Mother, she is right, but she's confusing the genuine state of indifference with the fake kind, a needy indifference, which is why she has such a trouble with the concept of need standing behind aesthetic experience -- her concept of indifference implies absence of, detachment from, needs, not their control. A massive difference between the two concepts exists. Let me just remind her that no literal detachment from one's needs can possibly exist, only an illusion, a hope, in eternal suppression of needs. But no suppression is eternal, every suppression eventually ending with explosion, and every explosion being yet another suppression.
Needy indifference, a hope in final detachment from one's needs, in eternal suppression. No such thing can ever occur, but one can try hard, work hard, put all of one's effort in it in order to make the magic last as long as it is possible -- one must believe in the coming indifference though, in salvation, otherwise the magic won't work. How does it work? You take a need, exaggerate it, and through exaggeration, you suppress all other needs. All the retards intelligent enough to comprehend what is up and what is down but too stupid to comprehend the art of interpolation, of smooth movement between point A and point B, will, in their desperate and needy effort to become indifferent, only become one thing, and that is the needy actors of indifference. So a boy can understand that girls are attracted to those who are indifferent, and he can understand that indifference is where it's at, and he can be honest enough with himself, he can admit to himself that he is needy, but being too stupid to understand the difference between symptom, consequence, and cause, between genuine and fake, natural and artificial, he will end up pretending to be indifferent, by say, not answering her calls, just because he wants to be, in reality to appear, indifferent. And so he speaks of indifference now, as if he understands it, as if indifference was just a symptom, a mere appearance of indifference, and not a psychological process that is mostly invisible to the eye and perceptible only by the few. As a consequence, a needy indifferent one hates needs and tries with all his might to get rid of them, the opposite of the truly indifferent one who always applies only a gentle force in the opposite direction of his needs, thus for the most of his time expressing his needs, rather than denying them.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
One...more...time.... Is this mic on? One, two...one two...one...one...one, one... Okay....let's repeat this one more time...
Need is an interpretation, the sensation, of Flux. The organism feels fluidity, upon its ordering as need/suffering. Suffering is need left unsatisfied for a period long enough to begin causing damage to the already established order. Why would an organism evolve the ability to feel such an uncomfortable thing? Because it is meant to facilitate the correction of temporal damage. The organism is alerted to the fact that damage has been done, due to this (inter)activity, this flux, and it must deal with it...or die.
What is Flux, I hear someone asking somewhere in the dark... Flux is (inter)activity, and is, indeed, endless, never-ending....continuous...as it is the very definition of existence. To exist is to be active, and/or (inter)active.
So, need/suffering is the sensation of existing.
Pleasure indicates an excess of energies available to the organism to deal with this damage done, to cope with Flux. This excess results in a momentary distraction, a relief from the sensation of existing...its price....and is found as being addictive among some who use chemicals to accomplish the same, fuckin' numbness, distraction. Are we listening out there? Hello?
This is why prolonged pleasure, or ease in satisfying needs, quickly results in atrophy, or an incapacity to deal with the Flux once this providing entity ceases to provide sheltering...if it is not the organism itself. If it is due to the organism's talents, power, whatever, then it also leads to decadence and atrophy, because having dealt with entropy there is no challenge to maintain the organism's ability to cope, and so it declines.
Why is it stressful, and demanding, and leads to suffering? Because life, an organism is as the word implies, an organizing, a becoming, an orderiiiiiiing. And in this Flux, which is tending towards entropy - because of this interactivity, which is need not get into now - so ordering is challenged, confronted, by flux, by (inter)activity resulting in increased disorder.
So need/suffering is the sensation of stress, of agon as the Greeks called, it, against flux...the self-organizing emergent unity resisting flux, and its disorganizing effects.
Right now, if you actually understood what I am saying, you will have realized that Nihilism is the offering of an escape from existing, or from the experience fo existing. That's what all Nihilists have in common.
Because what is pleasure but the momentary distraction from the costs of existing....from the experience of it. All pleasure negates or temporarily distracts consciousness from this fact...and consciousness evolved to deal with this fact.
Is this mic still on?
Anyway... Why are nihilists as a group, obsessed with words, numbers, symbols? Because only there can they escape, using noetic devices, from the phenomenon which does not give a shit about what they do, and what they want.
Why are nihilists a hodge-podge with a central common theme, because the method of escape does not matter, only its effectiveness. Some sue drugs, opium, religion, or words that divert from popular methods of escape.
For hem words like justice, beauty, one, pleasure, suffering, need, value must be disconnected form the indifferent to life phenomenon, and make it a pure noetic device, a divine concept....a God. you will meet a variety of such idiots and cowards, but they all share the same love of words. Words, their own particular word, precedes existence. For some love does, for others consciousness, for others god, for others, value, or beauty, or one, or nil....it does not matter what word is used as long as this word can offer them relief, an escape.
This word is always disconnected form the phenomenon, and this is the first sign that you are dealing with either an imbecile, who has settled for the primal, or with a coward, who uses words to avoid the obvious.
The moment you hear someone claim that consciousness is not the brain, or love has no motive, and that value precedes judgment, and consciousness, then you are certain that you are in the presence of a retard, or a coward, or, both....because no matter how smart one is fear reduces man to a level of stupidity akin to an animals.
Other than that, have a nice day.
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Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Do not be fooled by your relative comfort, because you are provided for in an artificially superfluous environment, or because your body has evolved storage organs to provide for its needs, until the next opportunity to appropriate new ones comes around. Do not be tricked by your fortunate condition of being born in abundance...which has a reason why it is so generous.
Indifference is, indeed, a symptom of excess, or power; of independence...and why the Jew-Christian God is an absurdity. But indifference is never absolute, as nobody is God. Therefore, power, strength is a measure of weakness....and a degree of dependence, not independence. and pleasure, contentment is a measure of need/suffering, and not of pleasure...pleasure is the negation, the negative component. In nihilism all is inverted, because we are dealing with imbeciles and cowards, motivated by the Neeeeed to escape reality, not to engage it.
Is anyone with me so far? No? Who cares? Anyway, back to pleasure.
There are three ways to experience suffering:
In the present, obviously....as the immediate experience of (inter)action of organism with otherness...in the past, as in through a reliving of an experience using memory, and in the future, as a projected anticipation of a possible interaction. And because there are 3 ways [the triad is not included in Abrahamic religions accidentally] to experience need/suffering, there are 3 ways to experience pleasure, as the negation of this need/suffering. A salvation. In memory, in the present, and in anticipation.
Longing is this need rooted in memory and projected as a possible future coming.
Now why need/suffering and not the other way around? Linear time...in short. Life emerges towards entropy, so even if there are multiple dimensions and time is relative, life is only possible in this towards entropy, as a resistance to it.
Because one requires effort to experience pleasure whereas one need not do anything to need and then to suffer...to feel pain. The timeline cannot be inverted, no matter how desperate nihilists wish they could, using their tricks and word-games.
Now why feel pleasure at the sight of a piece of art?
Simple...art is an expression of the creator's experience with need/suffering and with pleasure. It transmits the artists feelings to the observer, and the observer experiences it vicariously. The audience is pleased when the need/suffering is avoided, by this distance between observer and observed. This also explains the sudden release of stress we call laughter. We are pleased when we witness a distressing possibility we do not participate in, and we escape by being observers.
Why find a scenery pleasing? Because from a distance the death, the decaying, the price of life is obscured and the mind can generalize/simplify the vitality of (inter)action as a projection of probability....clean, pristine...comforting.
What is probability? Right...another term for order. Order is a word indicating a reduction of possibility, not its inflation. So, for an ordering organism all increase in order is pleasing...inspiring, comforting, etc.
A great work of art -- we are talking about art here, right, not about aesthetics in general, aesthetics being a broader category -- expresses one's needs in a controlled, gentle and smooth manner -- in the so-called "indifferent" manner -- wheareas a poor work of art expresses them in a needy, vulgar sort of way. The smoothness with which one's needs are expressed, the indifference that is communicated, makes one appear devoid of any need, but this is a misunderstanding, merely a consequence of one's terrific level of self-control. This much a mother can be right, but a mother is not going this far, isn't she, she's going farther than this, she's implying a different sort of indifference, a Schopenhaurian sort of indifference, where decadence and covert neediness rule.
A need, an energy, lurks behind every act, and so it is when we appreciate a work of art aesthetically. This much a mother can admit. But a mother contends, and rightly so, that there is a difference between needs, that there is a state of neediness, a needy appreciation of art, and a state of indifference, an indifferent appreciation of art, and that art is more about the second than the first. Mother, she is right, but she's confusing the genuine state of indifference with the fake kind, a needy indifference, which is why she has such a trouble with the concept of need standing behind aesthetic experience -- her concept of indifference implies absence of, detachment from, needs, not their control. A massive difference between the two concepts exists. Let me just remind her that no literal detachment from one's needs can possibly exist, only an illusion, a hope, in eternal suppression of needs. But no suppression is eternal, every suppression eventually ending with explosion, and every explosion being yet another suppression.
Indifference is not a word I've used. I have been talking about disinterest. There is a subtle difference there.
In the context of this conversation, interest is an attention paid to something from which another something can be gained. An interested appreciation understands that by judging something to be of a quality, that it must be pursued in order to prevent a suffering. Interest implies an action toward. I judge work to be good, because it gives me means to have food and shelter. Therefore I must work so that I do not starve and be exposed to the elements.
Beauty can be thought of in an interested way as well, but that is not an aesthetic appreciation. That is a functional appreciation. Between two plates of the exact same food, people will choose the one that is more beautifully presented, because that will give them the impression of a higher quality nutrient.
A disinterested appreciation understands that by judging something to be of a quality, that quality itself is all there is to be gained. Disinterest does not imply any action or course, there is nothing to pursue and no particular suffering to remedy. Why do people stare at sunsets, for example, other than to enjoy their beauty? This is an aesthetic appreciation of beauty, whereas an interested one isn't.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37199 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Difficult to understand how taste has already been shaped by need when one is taken over by an image, a sensation, a sound, a texture.
Difficult, for some, to grasp, or to accept, how an organism so reliant on light, and feeding on energies from the sun would find the sun fascinating. Difficult to think of light as one would sound... [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]...where one wavelength relates to the previous and following one as a sonar tone would, creating symmetry in this relating, and how our preferences for colors, and tones, are already determined by our organic needs.
Difficult when the motive is to purify the experience, by turning it into divinely noetic, with none of that "dirty" phenomenal stuff....to desperately want to be mind with no body: untouched, unsoiled, unaffected by this "nasty" world. Notice the position of the green in relation to red and violet. Right in the middle of man's perceptual-event-horizon; right in the mid-point, his comfort-zone.
There is a "logic" in coloration...[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]...a circular, mathematical balance. The extreme ends of human perception (perceptual-event-horizon) blending into a each other (Big Bang<>Big Crunch...Order<>Chaos...1<>0....). Color has relationships, hierarchies, order, beauty as in symmetry.
But have not these same minds attempted to comfort themselves with ideas about beauty that detach it from the phenomenal world and turn it into noetical, pure mysticism. They cannot accept the relationship of their admiration, appreciation, of beauty, with symmetry or genetic potential, fitness. They desperately want ti to be something detached, something purely contemplative...an idea with no reference point. Not a device of understanding but a tool for escaping. Because let's face it, beauty itself, relies on a distance to purify it from its "brutal nastiness". Perfect skin turns porous and tiny hairs soil the pristine ideal of a hairless, feminine surface.
Man recreates his idea(l) environment...of a forest, for instance, by purifying it. Each tree equidistant from the other, no hanging branches, clean paths, no rotting flesh, no danger lurking in the underbrush, no sound of prey being devoured alive by predator. a pristine, perfect, world, experienced from the distance of imagination. Have you not been lost in scenery. A mountain stream, the acropolis in the dusk, the lusciousness of a jungle? Have you not done so from afar, when you escape the heat, the mosquitoes, the humidity, the pain of sore feet, the sweet smell of decaying carcasses, the constant anxiety of a coming death?
And when man enjoys the scenery of a sunrise/sunset, because that's the only time the sun's energies are defused enough for him to see, he does so from behind the sheltering of an atmosphere, and the distance of space, where the heat, the radiation, cannot burn him to a crisp. He can now admire power, from afar, longing to possess it for himself, or to be possessed by it.
Power is inspiring, and frightening....a parental force. We are captured by its brilliance, only when we can safely distance ourselves from its effects.
...are aesthetic, dear....and we are exploring what aesthetic means.
Or do you prefer to throw words around, like pleasure, and imply they are the meaning of life, without exploring what pleasure refers to and what it is....this sensation? If so any bovine will do. Ride him until exhaustion.
Factors contributing to the development of taste, as a general aesthetic appreciation of otherness.
1- Organ Hierarchies The particular arrangement and relationships between an organism's organs and the cells that comprise them. Inheritance is the primary determinant, but mutations, and environmental effects (illness, etc), will also contribute to this inherited organic predisposition. These organ hierarchies will determine which organ needs will dominate consciousness. The organ's dominance, and the particular needs of that specific organ, will decide which elements will appeal to the individual more, and which, will not. This is the nature/past factor.
2- Habituation An individual will become accustomed to particular sources for particular elements. The habituation will decide preference for a specific way of preparing and presenting the source of the element needed. If the individual is more daring, extroverted, as a psychology, he may prefer trying new things, if he is more conservative, careful, he will prefer to return to what he knows. Meme, culture, is the nurturing factor here.
Changing the preparation and presentation of the elements needed, does not alter the need for them. The source will be preferred also due to its own essence. How much or how little of the needed element is present in it, and how much the preparation accentuates or diminishes this particular element.
In the more daring type it is the expectation of delight which is his needed requirement, shifting the focus form the present, immediate object/objective, to the projected, possible, one.
3- Accessibility A further aspect of nurturing is the accessibility of the element the individual needs. even if the dominant organ is other than the one needing this particular rare element, the fact that it is easily satiated, reduces its effect on consciousness. In its place the organ which is not satisfied will rise in dominating the conscious mind's focus.
4- Acuity The sensitivity of the sense organ, again inherited, or the inherited affected by environment, also determines the refinement in preference, resulting in a more discriminating judgment. The same elements will be appreciated in combinations because these combinations accentuate or diminish the element needed; some may prefer no combination, wanting the element to be as pure and distinct as possible. Also the combination creates a different sensation, which may satisfy more than one need simultaneously.
All this applies to primary needs. Psychological needs, affection sexual gratification, being some examples of them, are secondary needs. Not physical (body, phenomenon) but psychological (mind, noumenon). Prolonged dissatisfaction will affect the body - the psychosomatic unity, as mind collects data and also distributes data back, once analysis, processing, has occurred. This is particularly so for the secondary need for sexual gratification, because here evolution has developed a method to force the organism to act. The mechanism is reversed. Whereas needs are focused on assimilating and appropriating energies in this case evolution uses the pressure of excess to enforce a behavior. Sexual need is the secondary need, once the primary need has successfully collected energies, of having to discharge these accumulated energies. This discharge is masculine in spirit - as in both males and females testosterone governs it. It also explains why males, or more masculine individuals, dominate the expulsion of such libidinal energies in the form of art, or ideas. The need to discharge libidinal energies must be the adaptation of the process of growth to the heterosexual mechanism. Instead of immediately directing energies towards self-repair and growth, energies are stored, awaiting discharge. If no discharge occurs they begin to pressure the organism to act.
Here taste is governed by beauty (symmetry), a need for order, which is irresistible to a self-ordering unity It is governed by health, an attraction to heightened possibilities (superior probability), as this appears in otherness: fitness, fertility, willingness etc. It is governed by the individual's self-awareness, and self-acceptance (self-love); the first determines how much of self the individual knows, and understands, which is then reflected in his choices, and the second determines if he will seek out someone more like him, or if he will seek-out someone less like him, where his self-awareness decides what "like him" means.
In regards to inanimate objects, or to intangible ideas, here psychology is the primary deciding factor and so falls under the contexts of secondary needs. Symmetry, in tone, in coloration, in form, in odor, in texture, are all part of it, but time shifts focus from the phenomenon to the noumenon. Contemplation takes over when the object of appeal is distant, or not present at all. Through memory, imagination, abstraction, the individual's needs find pleasure in remembrance or in expectation. Distance, this necessary temporal gap between noumenon and phenomenon, has the added fo effect of imbuing the abstraction with an inflated positivity or negativity, depending no the individual's psychology, which again, is determined by organ hierarchies. The object of contemplation will be recalled, or projected as either a more negative prospect, but, as is most often the case for a life-form such as man, and in particular for the moderns, it will project an exaggerated purified expectation, or it will recall a pleasing event in a cleansed form, warping the original experience with it. In both cases the degree of disappointment will be determined by the degree of inflation, and so contemplation without validating the memory, or the projection, will be preferred, because in memory and in expectation all remains pure, and forever unsoiled by phenomenon.
Modern man's obsession with the noetic is the product of this avoidance of reality which will shatter the romanticized memory or the naive projection. In thought no resolution happens, the world does not destroy the abstraction, and so it allows it to continue being a source of pleasure for the mind.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Fri Jan 23, 2015 12:57 pm; edited 1 time in total
...are aesthetic, dear....and we are exploring what aesthetic means.
Or do you prefer to throw words around, like pleasure, and imply they are the meaning of life, without exploring what pleasure refers to and what it is....this sensation?
I can put a bar of chocolate through a high pressure liquid chromatographer and obtain its exact composition. I can make an association between those flavor molecules and the sensors in the olfate and palate, and then to their nutritional functions, and I can explain those preferences evolutionarily.
But does any of that explain to a person who has never had chocolate what it is to eat chocolate, what eating chocolate feels like?
