Parodites' Daemon

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:35 am

Quote :: ""......... doubt and suffering can only serve as the presentiment of a replete and living self, of some vital power within us that longs to be exhausted, and certainly can never extinguish such a vitality; for who and what a person is depends in the final case, not on the truth he has acquired or the morality for which he lives, but rather on the number of passions, joys, sufferings, and thoughts that he can unite within the circle of his comprehension, it depends upon the breadth of that image, of that idea, which he is capable of drawing from out of their opposition and turmoil, for anything not held within the confines of this image will certainly be lost amidst the passage of years, and everything not informed by its singularity destroyed. It is what Shelley called the hope which has created from its own wreck the thing it contemplates; it is Eros, that love which ennobles philosophy, which searches into the depths of mortal passion, which chastens the springs of joy and suffering, which raises our passions and experiences into the higher language of ideas; it is love, which engenders within that suffering which is the bitter fruit of all practical morality the seed of heroicism, that unites the disparate elements through which our individuality comes into being. When the sky darkens and the storm sets in, the bird does not cease flying because it is afraid, but because it can no longer see the horizon in its infinite distance, and it longs to brave immensity and impossibility, and cannot live under anything but that boundless horizon; so too does a man live and take shape only in the horizon of his love, his hope, and his ideas." -- Hamartia"

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:36 am

Quote :: "Nietzsche often makes the point that we cannot understand the origin of a thing based on what it does or what it is used for now. In the present time we understand the conscience to be the internal voice of a moral system. It has, or produces, this inner sense of right and wrong because the moral system has been so thoroughly ingrained in a person that he no longer has to think about it, it is intuited.

When man first learned to look beyond the veil of time, when he began to think... He very quickly learned how to differentiate internal states of emotion and drive in accordance to the now easily divisible world outside of him. Man could now only act in accord with a particular emotional state that was paired with a change he wanted to see in the world outside of him. He could no longer behave as animals do, he had to think, he now possessed a will. The problem is that individual drives do not possess enough power to compel man to act, save for those drives directly involved in his survival, and that is only because they overcome his reason. Starvation would compel him to eat. But there was no way to evolve social bonds, a culture, anything beyond hunter-gather societies. There was no way to value. The fact that the individual drives were not powerful enough to seduce man to action is exampled by the fact that they do not grant him the capacity to value, and it is only value that will satisfy that hunger which no other animal possesses, the hunger of his newly developed intellect.

He could only pair one drive with an intended result, he could not appraise many results and value them against each other. He was just a clever animal at that point. He needed a lot of stimuli and got only a little consciousness out of it... He needed a way to weigh many different decisions and drives against each other, but for that he needed a developed sense of self-hood.

So now a "self" had to be developed, the thing that values... Something that can apprehend the variances in drive and emotion, between internal states, that can comprehend them and itself as something enduring throughout them. The disorganization of his integrated sensuality, the separation of his animal nature into constituent drives through his reason, took on a life of its own. Two inner states were reified in an abstraction in which their discontiguity, their variance, their difference, could be comprehended. This is the beginning of the spiritualization of man and world, and the development of the "self," of the psychological sense of selfhood, in such abstractions. Those abstractions in which man grasped the changes, the transformations and difference between his emotional states, granted him more and more consciousness of his selfhood. So the first stage of the development of the conscience, the capacity to value, was the intuited sense of self-permanence, self-hood.

Contrast is then the basis of our consciousness. There is no consciousness without the separation of inner and outer phenomenon into opposition, oppositions which must be reified in some abstraction that makes us conscious of the variance between two things or inner states. It would have been psychologically painful at first because all the drives responsible for the survival of man had to be placed in opposition to one another. Death rituals that celebrated life, things of this sort, took place. Mass suicides, cannibalism, death orgies, pain festivals. All of this was necessary. It formed the first social connections beyond hunter-gather, ie. religious connections, as well as helped develop self-consciousness. The failed abstractions, the values that proved suicidal or ended up leading toward death, obviously we don't know of. The failed cultures to which they belonged never lived long enough to write their own history books. But there is an extensive history which we have no knowledge of which details such failed cultures, the forgotten madness of our species, and much self-imposed torture. Only the "sanest" values and value-creators survived, all the history and culture we know is of them. The values and moral philosophies of this survivor culture are no more credible though, they just didn't end up killing us. Well, they didn't end up killing all of us.

In our time, in recent history.... this process of reifying the variance of the inner life, of extending the sphere of consciousness over the collapsed foundation of animal instincts, is only carried out by "geniuses," through moral philosophy, art, etc. But in our early history all men were doing this, in order to deal with their destroyed psyches and broken drives. Values are created only in response to the fact that there is no impetus to live. All men once needed that impetus, few men do now."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:36 am

Quote :: "As yet man lacks a fatum, a limit. He is only ethos daimon, the ascending and descending, wavering spirit, half beast half god.

"Ει ουν φιλοσοφητέον είτε μη φιλοσοφητέον, φιλοσοφητέον, (Man, by nature of his daemonic existence, must philosophize, philosopher or not.) to speak with Athanasius. We cannot, in the manner of one of the old Greeks, name the world a cosmos and beauty until we have named our own soul a cosmos and beauty; to behold and grasp all the world in an idea we must first have come to know ourselves as one particular being and no other and have had everything good and evil rent from the trembling heart and held, not in time, which diffuses our being like colors from a ray of light, but in eternity, which concentrates it. Every man of genius has believed in the eternal, that belief is the very condition of his vitality and flourishing. Perhaps this belief serves as nothing more than an obscuration of the spirit, which man requires if he is to ascend into the highest possible regions of his genius; perhaps he must find all the earth wanting if, like Cassandra of Ilion, he is to utter things not fit for the earth, but it is always the same, and we become like that angel whose wings were set aflame when he reentered this world, if one can entertain the old Gnostic myth. We suffer upon turning back into ourselves, we suffer from the failure to seize upon that inner motion of the heart's genius, which alone could move us to acknowledge the ideal as fate; the consequence of that strange lust which compels us to embrace obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty, but moreover to prefer this benighted world of the self over that law which strikes against the heart when love, fully matured, overcomes and inspires us to act with proud indifference against the hazards of our mortality. Dei virtutem dei sapientiam, [knowledge, for god, is a virtue] or if one may reverse the old theologian's paradox: yes, and man's sin; or, to reinterpret the account of Genesis, what flowered with the greatest sweetness in heaven is reaped with the most bitterness upon the earth." - Hamartia"

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:37 am

Quote :: "One must distinguish the act of recollection from that of mere memory. The poetry of recollection, the genuine pleasure in it, lies in embracing ones own works and deeds, in taking responsibility for them and in recognizing the past as truly constitutive of one's personality. How is such a thing accomplished? That would be a great piece of knowledge with which to bless our youthfulness, for in this lies the passion and the beauty of old age. The man who recollects absolutely is infinitely creative; absolute recollection opens unto a future in which an endless host of eventualities, be they comic or tragic, mingle inseparably. For the man who possesses an absolute power of recollection possesses also the absolute power of synthesis, since in fact recollection is a synthesis, and is capable of bringing to light only memories that have been integrated into a totality as self-consciousness: it is itself the production of self-consciousness. Yet, the more one recollects, the more this synthesis is allowed to bring forth, the more transformations this self-consciousness undergoes, and thus the more difficult it becomes to recollect, since the self must re-orient itself within the totality. In fact, however, each of us constitutes such an impossible power, insofar as we love: hence the wisdom of the ancients, that philosophy begins in love, in Eros, and that all knowledge is recollection. Love, rather it is inspired by truth or by a woman, grants us the opportunity to bathe once again in that primevous spring, that from which the self first emerged in its paucity and which, now fully enlarged, it must return into, which is to say it invigorates the daemonic, the inner disproportion of man, to resolve itself. The man in love wants to call up from within himself his whole life, in order to relate it to the loved one, he wants to translate all of his self-consciousness into consciousness of the beloved, just as the philosopher wishes to relate all knowledge to truth, and this absolute synthesis engenders the thought of some future at once absolutely vague and absolutely distinct, in which this love is somehow consummated, or in the case of the philosopher, the thought of some truth at once absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct, in which all ideas are conjoined in their preternatural unity, in a totality, be it in the vein of Spinoza or Hegel. But the synthesis being carried out within us, which has now become an excess, an infinitely productive power, at last rises up against to meet this future, and cannot embrace it, so that the totalizing procedure of thought becomes an operation which introduces ceaseless differentiation into the inner life. It can here do one of two things: either it rejects this future as alien and hostile to it, becomes mere vagary, uncommitted to anything but itself, and realizes itself in its sensuality and temporal aspect, or it equates itself to it, it equates itself to this vague and yet distinct hope for the eternal and the true, it becomes that hope and matures into philosophy. Sensual love is merely the negative expression of the excess, an excess that can only communicate itself destructively, because it desires to communicate the infinite root of the self and the procreative synthesis; ideal love is the positive expression of the excess, which is capable of concretizing its language because it has restricted itself to the expression of the finite dimension which it occupies in relation to the excess outside of it, the eternal. The pathos of the former is the genius of artists, sometimes called melancholy, while the pathos of the later is that of "philosophy.""

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:37 am

Quote :: "So the Greeks thought of the self as an antagonism, a contradiction, between empirical reality, time, and desire, and on the other hand form, the eternal, etc. This contradiction is Eros, love. Eros can fall into matter, sensuality, and physical beauty, but it can also ascend the ladder of being and attain to philosophy. It thus constitutes an excess, which by its very nature cannot be absorbed in a dialectical synthesis. The Greeks made the self livable by exploding it into a series of conceptual oppositions, time and eternity, form and matter, etc. Each of these oppositions provided a vantage in which the self could orient itself within its own excess, each provided a ruling passion, a new pathos, a new mode of life, a particular kind of "subjectivity." Of course no ancient Greek says any of this, this is my interpretation of them.

The Judaeo-Christians had a whole new conception of the self. To them the contradiction which constituted the self signified not an excess, but a fundamental lack, an abyss. Why is man such a grotesque synthesis of conflicting powers, of the finite and the infinite? How is he even possible? It is because, all the way down, man is missing something. It is not the things of the earth he misses, for he is equally a temporal and earthly thing, nor the things of heaven, for he can indeed philosophize, practice justice, and achieve virtue.... No, no, he is missing God. Thus they psychologically figured out a way to cohere the self. Kierkegaard is all about this, for him this "God" provides the self a leap of faith by which to cohere and bring into unity its despairing relation of the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. He himself could not figure out how exactly the religious life, how God, cohered the two parts, but I have, and I just explained why it works psychologically. The reinterpretation of the excess as a lack allows the two parts to be cohered when they are brought into a unified longing and desire for this missing thing, "God."

The problem is, the Christian answer to the self leads to the fragmentation I talked about, and the Greeks never realized the full extent of the logic of the daemonic, ie. transcendental goods, so they tended to just annihilate themselves in mystical union with the cosmos or in abstract exaltation above the universe, like Plato, exhausted demonically but without an idea in which to repose and take cognizance of that fact. Nietzsche himself ended in annihilation like a good Greek, a will to power annihilated in the Will to Power. With access to my philosophy he would have been able to understand his eternal recurrence as his "transcendental good" and avoided that.

My philosophy, then, is ultimately an answer to the self, and to the pain of being a Self. It is the only other answer besides the Greek and Christian one. It is also the only answer that truly works. I am the first human being to ever live that didn't hate himself."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:39 am

Quote :: "Self-valuing cannot be stimulated directly. The instinct for it can however be indirectly trained, the ancients did just this.

One of Holderlin’s most beautiful pieces of poetry may be found in the sentence, “If once the divine succeeds through the poem so near to my heart, then I welcome the grave’s eternal silence.” The recognition of something beyond the sphere of the poet’s individuality and experience is the necessary precondition for his flourishing, and the Greek pantheon served in just this way for Holderlin himself as well as for the ancients. Through such a recognition the mortal act is prevented from being closed, and the possibility of the divine announcing itself through it can be entertained indefinitely; through the great symbols of their mythology the ancient Greeks succeeding in transforming the mortal sphere, the domain of “eternal silence,” into a genuine depth, into which one might venture in the hope of discovering some new datum of experience yet to be formulated. Mortality and finite, lived experience for the ancients became a womb, the “secret birth of things,” to cite Schiller, into which they willingly entered when the light of their ideas no longer bore enough of itself to kindle the heart of the poet. It is with this piece of poetic wisdom that Holderlin wrote his tragedy about Empedocles. What I have called the “daemonic,” then, finds its most poignant expression in the birth of poetic inspiration. The light of our ideas has faded as well, and yet we do not know how to conceive of our mortal life in this way, as a depth- only through the recognition of something beyond our individuality and experience, only through the refusal of hypostasizing experience as an absolute, can the circle of mortal life remain opened.

It is not only in a religious sense that one should understand this for indeed all of our truly philosophical ideas, comprehended not as positive objects of knowledge and hypostases of experience, but as representatives of this transcendental order- that order of things exceeding the sphere of individuality and experience, have equally allowed the finite and transitory ego to exist as an open rather than closed circle. The Gods as representatives of this order were imagined when the continuity between the language of ideas and experience had not been precisely delineated through a philosophical vocabulary. We must, now armed with such a language, realize the “transcendental unity of ideas,” through a new morality that aims, not to hypostasize experience and grasp in positive knowledge a series of particular virtues and vices, but rather to fully explicate this continuity; where philosophy exists to represent this transcendental order, morality most exist to mediate the two spheres, the spheres of experience and ideality.

Self-valuing is the correspondence between these two spheres. Holderlin enacted this correspondence when writing about the death of Empedocles (Empedocles wanted to prove he was an immortal God by jumping into mount Aetna, and as he did so, he perished.) One can only accomplish this by recognizing something that exceeds one's own personal existence, (for Nietzsche, eternity) an excess which represents an order to which the self that is bearing recognition actually belongs. Nietzsche had to recognize an eternity beyond the sphere of his own empirical, lived existence in order to finally recognize himself as an eternal being, in order for the empirical and transcendental aspects of his ego to finally correspond.

But everything about our modern world and the direction that science and philosophy have taken seems bent on “closing the circle” of mortal life, on annihilating any possibility of mediating the transcendental and empirical spheres of the ego."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:40 am

Quote :: "There can be no recompense for that mighty liberty which, bounded only by birth and death, is called Life. Not with pain, love, malice, or joy can it be rewarded, for these belong unto it, but only by the man himself. Earth claims earth, life has no end other than itself, and the heavens regard only their own: this law is what the Greeks named fate which, in great opposition to our conception of it, offers itself as a limit to man, world, and god, rather than an indifferent litany of their impending tragedies, failures, and victories. This truth cannot be realized in the visions of the saint and does not lie within the grasp of contemplation, but must be resolved in the movements of life- ethos anthropos daimon. Like all real truths, destiny confers to us no maxim of conduct, but rather that light in which the image of human life, once diffused and disunited in time, is concentrated and beheld sub species aeternitas, which is to say in its unity. All great symbols, as all great ideas which stand as representative of some portion of human existence, suggest one another in their finite number as naturally as the musical notes induce their own infinite combination and recombination in the soul of the artist, and because life offers up to us essentially the same incorruptible, indivisible experience the genius of their unity is realized only to the extent that one has indwelled in life. The beauty of a supreme work of art or philosophy is a refrain of the indivisible sum of experience that is called human life which, however much of a variation upon the eternal theme it may offer, is nonetheless equivalent to it, and recognizes its birth and death, its fate, in it. The world is a poem for the poet, a cross for the saint, a sphinx for the philosopher. There is a universal justice, but it is that which we render upon ourselves in following upon the course of thought like a dying star in slow extinction before the pale bound of the firmament. In this slow death do we finally recover something of life; that sweet dialogue which is attended to in secret between ourselves and our own soul, to speak with Plato, which is incapable of communicating itself to all but the most superficial periphery of our existence in words and deeds and is resolved silently in the drama of the ideal. The suffering of Empedoclean man, of the longing for personal immortality, and the suffering of Faustian man, that all-embracing hunger which clamors in its own pain but to taste existence, are reconciled in the heroic annihilation of being in becoming; the forgery of human happiness, the idol of virtue, all the mortal and immortal powers of the earth and heavens strike us as a remarkable fatuity when beheld against this secret and this silence, against that unfathomed peace to use the expression of Leopardi, the unknowable basis of that dialogue which is after all only the rarest species of the knowable, be it called sin by the saint, desire by the Buddhist, or death, for it must lead us into heaven, nirvana, and life, for it must lead us to that point where the transient play of appearances ceases to offer up to us vacant forms and we, at last peering into the remote fulcrum of our life for we are at last peering into the remote fulcrum of our own self, declare with Tasso, ich weib es, sie sind eqig, denn sie sind. [Only what truly is endures.] Our character is but the extremity of the ideal; our personality, only the degree of some predominant conception raised to the highest power. Every mind has its own nycht or hemera in that general nychthemeron of the soul; every personality, as the high point and the moment of greatest vitality of some conception, as necessarily only a moment of tension in the idea, can find a repulsive note and answering strain in the progress of the intellect and thereby awaken to that desire to reconcile knowledge and being, to the daemonic, and to recognize what is called fate. Philosophy is nothing less than the aspiration to complete humanity."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:40 am

Quote :: "To equate the epistemic and ontic spheres and the ideal and real ego would essentially mean to grasp the living and experienced self, the self as an identity, as merely a differentiation of the excess, an excess which would thereby be grasped as equally the self, albeit ideally. There is a final conceptual opposition between the real ego, the experienced self, and some other thing, in which the excess must be differentiated. It must be differentiated as either the self or this other thing. To differentiate it as the self would lead to what I just described, the equating of real and ideal ego, the exhaustion of one's daemonism, the release of the self from time, etc. To differentiate the excess in this final opposition as that other thing, as not the self, would lead to the mystic experience and annihilation within the godhead- it would lead to the failure to completely develop the epistemic subject."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:42 am

Quote :: "1.

Greece- early, pre-Platonic Greece found its reason in the structure of the cosmos and of nature themselves, this structure was the logos, which was reflected in human consciousness, and drawn inward through the activity of an unreflected egoic principle to form the first great philosophical ideas. Thus philosophy always begins in a passive state of reflection or wonder for the Greeks. This process constitutes "empirical reason." Later there was proposed a transcendent, unknowable, divine order in distinction to the order of nature. The venture of this divine order corresponds with a structural incapacity in self-consciousness itself, to that unreflected, egoic principle, for in time it leads to an inseparable division in the subjective and empirical philosophical systems. Reason thereafter became the aim of resolving this problem, of extinguishing this unreflected principle by bringing it into reflected self-consciousness; its appointed task was in hypostasizing human experience and the content of subjectivity as absolute. To do this reason had to decompose the relations of the cosmic and natural orders, recomposing its object within the structure of subjectivity to realize its “idea.” This "idealism" finds its beginning in Plato, and constitutes the beginning stage of "transcendental reason." The project of denaturalizing nature and man there also began. The drawing inward of nature is the principle of the former empirical reason, the projection of the human being, in the manner of Feuerbach, of the later.

Transcendental reason is marked by three major philosophical developments: in Eriugena human nature and the nature of the divinity are equated, in Schelling the inner lack or structural incapacity of self-consciousness is itself expressed to the divinity, and the unfathomable ground of the divine is discerned as non-entity and nothingness, God himself carrying this lack in potentia and man expressing it in actuality as evil, and in Kierkegaard the structure of the divine is itself collapsed, necessitating the leap of faith in order to sustain transcendental consciousness and religious experience. Nietzsche expresses the final development in empirical reason, the idea of the world itself is, in him, finally reflected in human consciousness as the will to power- man is at last “naturalized.” The full field of discourse between these two modes of reason must be discerned, so that the valuing subject beneath and behind all philosophy and morality can itself be discerned, for it seems to me that philosophy itself, constituted by a secret canon, forms a kind of plane in which the thinking subject takes form; a plane constituted by the relation between the empirical and transcendental spheres of self-consciousness.

As it stands, these two spheres of thought have been finally separated. Empirical reason has abandoned speculative philosophy and become impotent, materialist, and empty, while transcendental reason, by way of Kierkegaard, has been annihilated in the image of the hidden God and has hypostatized mystical experience as the ultimate philosophical category: the Gods of Greece became the God of Abraham, the antagonism constitutive of the self was grasped as an abyss and inner longing for something other, for something higher than the world. This dissolution of philosophy has had the consequence of completely dissolving man's consciousness of the excess, of the unreflected principle beneath and within all thought.

From this knowledge the path to a revitalized philosophy can be discovered. Instead of beginning with identity, with ousia, with being and the question of being, as the first philosophers had done in Greece, a mistake which gave rise to the dissolution of philosophy into what I called empirical and transcendental reason, we should begin with the "excess," that which cannot be absorbed dialectically. This leads to a reversal of the ontic and epistemic spheres. The excess does not signify noumenal reality, does not signify the ontic reality, the ousia or being which cannot be comprehended by thought, but rather does the excess signify the inexhaustible mental component of the human intellect which is constitutive of that intellect and of our consciousness. This component is given precedence, rather than the ontic. In other words, the epistemic subject comes before the ontic subject. Hiedigger's project must then be abandoned, which relied on the primordiality and precedence of the ontic subject, dasein.

2.

The capacity to differentiate and articulate the excess through conceptual oppositions I have named the daemonic. These conceptual oppositions are not exclusive, and are potentially infinite. Kierkegaard's project must here be abandoned, which relied on the exhaustablity of the epistemic subject and the construction of several definite stages or conceptual oppositons and an either/or choice between them. That element of volition, of having to make a choice, a leap of faith, made the ontic subject once again the first order or primordial subject, as the will is a being and not an epistemic entity.

3.

Identities, "beings," are merely "remainders" of the excess. Contra Spinoza's determinatio est negatio. All identification here becomes differentiation, of the excess. Thought cannot therefor be "totalized," ie. constructed into an image of the world as a whole, ie. a system in the manner of Hegel or Spinoza himself. Schelling had a similar conception:

"There is an unfathomable basis of reality in things, the remaineder that cannot be contained, cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but remains in the depths. Out of that which lacks understand, true understanding is born."

The dialectic which rests at the heart of Eriugena's magnum opus, which he uses to construct a division of nature or periphyseon, recapitulates Dionysisus's Christian version of the Proclean scheme of procession, return, and remaining (prohodos, epistrophe, mone.) According to that dialectic the super-essential cause of all things (God) moves through all things as immanent to them and stands beyond them as trascendent of them. As cause, the divine is all in all- and so addressed, metaphorically, by kataphatic theology; but as super-essential, the divine is nothing in the midst of everything (a Pascalian meditation, though here applied not only to man but to the divinity itself) and so is more properly addressed by negative or apophatic theology. This dialectic of immanence and trascendence is intended to express the basic foundation of incomprehesibility which underlies the divine and all forms of mystic knowledge.

In the book of Job, God attempted to vindicate himself by listing all of his creations and the breadth of the universe; mountains, seas, stars, animals, etc. For Eriugena God is always the God of Job who reveals himself in the whirlwind of created things and realizes himself both as many and as no one in and through this. The polyonymous anonymity and nothingness of the human reflects perfectly (because it reflects abyssally) the polyonymous anonymity of the divine insofar as both the human and god would realize themselves in and through the creation.
The basic idea here is that man approaches so closely the divine, that the two become indistinguishable; the polynomous nothingness of the human reflects, abyssally, that of God himself.

We see that this unabsorbable excess does not lie in the ontic dimension, as a question of being, but rather lies immanently within the thinking subject itself, constitutive of its very subjectivity. Schelling names this excess "Will," in opposition to ousia or entity, being, nature.

"Will is primordial being, and all predicates apply to it alone- groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation, self creation. The old proposition is here once again in place: the original being is will, and will is not merely the beginning but also the content of the first emergent being."

You see in this passage he is articulating a very similar logic of immanence-transcendence... "not merely the beginning but content of the first emergent being."

Schelling continues: "Any philosophy which does not remain grounded in the negative but tries instead to reach what is positive immediately and without that negative foundation will inevitably die of spiritual impovershment. " This is also hinted at by Luther when he speaks of the power of God being even in the hand of a murderer. "The freedom with which the sinner operates and by which evil is perpetrated is still a divine power. Man has perverted the position of the potencies, and so god operates perversely in the perverse, he no longer acts as will but unwill." This perverting quality at the basis of man's freedom, this indwelling of the evil principle as the principle of negation, even in the profoundest desire to do right, I express in one of my own theological speculations: "By desiring something we have not fist completely emptied from out of our own heart, and repudiated from the dark and selfish principle within ourselves, which by its nature assimilates all things to itself, we destroy it. " This all points again and again to the knowledge that this evil principle indwells totally in human freedom, and engulfs even the most selfless desire to do good: it produces in those who have born its revelation what Hamann calls a "Holy Hypochondria." In short, this evil principle, the principle of negation, of the unfreedom of the will, of material, etc. is rather a positive affirmation of human freedom, not a refutation of it.

Schelling goes on to construct his own division of nature on this scheme: from the primal will or groundlessness issues first, darkness, suffering, irrationality, evil; the whole material and created world of forces and chaos. He speaks of it in this passage "For it was the teaching of all peoples who counted time by nights that the night is the most primordial of things. But what is the essence of night, if not lack, need, and longing? For this night is the nature looking forward to the light, the night longing for it, eagre to receive it. Another image of that first nature, whose whole essence is desire and passion, appears in the consuming fire which so to speak is itself nothing, is in essence only a hunger drawing everything into itself."

He goes on next to assert that the second "potency" as he calls it, or thing issued from out of the primordial ground, is light; that is, rationality, goodness, the other side of human freedom. His third potency he calls love, it is the realization of human freedom as including both this dark and light principle, evil and goodness; freedom as this double movement itself which is accomplished as love.

But compare Eriugena's dialectic with this three-fold potency. I interpret these potencies with this dialectic; the darkness and evil of the suffering, material universe, as the principle of all negation, issues from the primordial ground (the super-essential cause) but the light, goodness, rationality of human subjectivity, and freedom- that element of positivity, returns to this primordial ground through the process of thought and philosophy, submerging itself within it, and finally we have mone or the remaining, what remains unincorporated into this dialectical process and cannot be annihilated in the primordial ground.

Schelling's Naturphilosophie stood as a great testament to the depth of the transcendental mode of reason, but was never completely developed, owing to its insurmountable philosophical inadequacies. Yet the philosophical concept of the excess can find great material for its articulation in Schelling, as it can in Eriugena and Kierkegaard.

4.

Identities can be rigidly defined without solidifying a single conceptual opposition, insofar as the logic of the daemonic is upheld, that is to say, insofar as precedence is granted to the epistemic rather than ontic subject, in line with the first thesis. This gives us the possibility of ontology without metaphysic, that is, a philosophy in which the epistemic subject is wholly developed through continuous differentiation of the excess, resulting in the production of identities (ontologies) which do not require any antithesis for their definition. They stand in and of themselves as identities and are pure affirmations rather than negations. In all philosophy to define, as Spinoza said, was to negate: to say that something was an angel meant it was not a man. But in my philosophy, identities are what is left over after the excess is differentiated within a conceptual opposition: they are ontic realities produced by the philosophical elaboration of the epistemic subject. In other words, and to use the simple example again, in my philosophy "angel" and "man" would both be self-sufficient realities and parts of a conceptual opposition within which the excess is differentiated. Once that excess is differentiated as one or the other, say a man, this leads to the breaking through to simply a new series of conceptual oppositions, perhaps man and beast, within which the excess is differentiated again. Because identities do not require negation in order to be defined, the ontology constructed with my method cannot devolve into metaphysics. The formula would here be antithesis-thesis-thesis, ie. conceptual opposition- differentiation- excess. This is obviously very different than a dialectic and the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. Here I am revising and appropriating things I gathered from Eriugena and Proclus:

" ... Presentiments of a philosophical category which could represent these relations between real and ideal ego, along with this moral potency; which could represent a kind of relationship which stands beyond all dialectic, can be found for example in the Proclean scheme of procession, return, and remaining, of prohodos, epistrophe, and mone. This dialectic demonstrates that God, conceived of as the super-essential cause of all things, moves through all things as immanent to them and stands beyond them as transcendent of them. This dialectic of immanence and transcendence is intended to express the basic foundation of knowledge which cannot be grasped, that unincorporated concept which underlies the divine and all forms of mystic knowledge, of negative and apophatic theology. Moreover, this principle of the unincorporated object of thought reveals a structural relationship between the aspects of divine immanence and transcendence which it is the goal of the theologian to discover, (Eriguena made this the subject of his Periphyseon) insofar as God does not only reveal himself as something that acts upon the world, but also as something that acts within and through the world. "

Nietzsche's project must here be abandoned, which used the ontic subject (the will) to break completely past the epistemic sphere.

5.

Of even greater import than this ontology without metaphysic is the possibility of a morality without either ontology or metaphysic: ie. the philosophical and complete development/elaboration of the epistemic subject by fully following through the concept of the daemonic with reference to a concept I elaborate elsewhere, namely the transcendental good.

Phenomenology is and has always been essentially the elaboration of the relationship between the epistemic and ontic spheres, and psychology arose from it as basically the same thing but with greater emphasis on the ontic sphere, ie. greater emphasis on experience and volition. This is why Kierkegaard in my mind was the first great psychologist, not Nietzsche, since he wrote the first proper psychology by constructing the either/or which allowed the ontic subject, by way of the idea of choice, to take precedence over the epistemic subject. But my new morality would obviously be totally different from either of the two things."

_________________
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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:43 am

Quote :: "Take Sartre's (A writer for whom I find in myself very little affinity or respect. The love of freedom for the sake of freedom is something that instinctually reviles me, no matter how spiritualized it may have become.) summary of modern philosophy, that existence precedes essence. Most of philosophy held the opposite, that essence comes before existence, ie. that the soul predates bodily incarnation. My philosophy has endeavored to posit them both at the same level of philosophical categorization and therefor to affirm them as equally positive expressions; existence and essence are two terms in which that excess which underlies their very conceptualization and which cannot be truly contained by either idea is articulated. Thus: existence and essence are both coterminous, and yet do not contain one another, for as philosophical categories they do not contain the excess out of which they were produced and which is reflected in their differentiation. I would give a final formulation of the principle as: "Essence is not adequate to existence; existence is not adequate to essence." With this principle one can defend the freedom of the will despite also accepting the existence of a determined universe, because essence (the will's freedom) and existence (the material universe) are equatable and non-containing of one another, by virtue of their constitutive excess.

Heidegger rejected Sartre on the basis that a reversal of a metaphysical claim (which is what his philosophy amounts to) is nonetheless metaphysical, and this point is very true. Heidegger however locates the excess in the ontic sphere, as I have said before, and like Nietzsche he uses the strength of the ontic subject (Will for Nietzsche, Dasein for Heidegger) to break completely through the epistemic, that is, the metaphysical. That rendered Heidegger basically philosophically impotent in the remotest extreme of his thought, and all he can do there is silently point to the truth of being. Perhaps, as he says, it can be found in music or poetry. At any rate he abandons philosophy at the extremity of philosophy. I have rather located the excess within the epistemic sphere, elaborating it phenomenologically, that is, in the way in which it structures human consciousness, as well as philosophically, with the concept of the daemonic. I have retained all the strengths of dualistic thought, ontology, and metaphysics, as well as all the strengths of ontic, monistic thought while having inherited none of their weaknesses. In my philosophy there is a monism of the human subject as an excess underlying all consciousness, as well as a philosophical dualism because it is through conceptual oppositions that the excess is reflected in consciousness, and at every step of the way the dualism can be dissolved or the monism expanded dualistically: that is the strength of it. These conceptual oppositions represent not synthesized polarities on the part of a Hegelian self-consciousness as they do in Kierkegaard, as between the eternal and temporal, but rather an immanent division of the human consciousness in an effort to reflect itself daemonically in the mirror of philosophical ideas as that excess which cannot be resolved into any conceivable polarity expressed by them. Philosophy, then, is essentially the stimulation of the real ego, the synthesizing and creative self, the self that lives, desires, and dies, which is worn away in the struggle of eternity and time, love and desire, by the ideal ego; that self which disunites, polarizes, and reflects, and the difficulty of philosophy is the seeming inability to relate the two, it is the fact that no eternity is able to express the beauty and the languishing of time, nor is time, in its last bitter extremity, able to express the absolution of the eternal, for the human self intuits within both terms some substance after its own nature, and which belongs to a still higher order of things in which the meaning of time stands of itself, and the meaning of the eternal is untouched by the walks of time. The real ego experiences the fullness of its life and will only in fleeting moments throughout the course of its existence, and it is this ideal ego which is the heart into which it lays this fullness. Nietzsche comes beautifully close to my conception in the thought of the eternal recurrence, yet he fails to draw out the excess inherent in the conceptions of time and the eternal and, thereby unable to transfer it to a higher field of discourse, he only succeeds in equating the two concepts. His thought perhaps succeeds in inducing a stimulation of the real by the ideal ego, but does not satisfy the real demand of genuine morality."

_________________
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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:44 am

Quote :: "While the artist wants to stamp the eternal with the image of time, to extend the sphere of the living and perishing consciousness so as to encompass all the breadth of creation, mainly by way of realizing harmonies within the order of nature, the philosopher wants to stamp time with the image of the eternal, to contract his consciousness to a single point, to the ego, so as to encompass it by thought, mainly by dissolving those harmonies and relations, by introducing contrariety and antithesis into the orders of nature and thereby unriddling the impassioned and bodily existence in which he feels himself condemned back into the mute regions of thought. In this way he is afforded objectivity, a view beyond himself and the narrow bound of his egoic consciousness, so that he might comprehend the idea behind phenomenal appearance.
True morality, on the other hand, which has been only profaned by the mocking idols of merely human happiness and virtue, in comparison to whose ardor the truths of man are only velleity and convenience, wants neither to extend the border of the egoic consciousness or to contract it, but rather to contract the creation itself by realizing the principium individuationis, the essence of the will, by means of the will. Stimulated by the ideal ego through philosophy, by the thought of the eternal soul, the real ego aims to lay into it its fullness and life, and realizes a morality. All moral realities thereby inevitably create their own objects, as love creates beauty, hope creates happiness, and freedom creates justice. The moral problem is the problem of realizing in the image of the eternal the meaning of the struggle of time and mortality. When beheld with this hopeless and yet necessary question in one's mind, all the virtues and the sins of man become equally insufferable and petty folly."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:44 am

Quote :: "One would not ask of a dog that it should become more of a dog, nor would one rebuke a dog for being any less of a dog than it should be. All animals live in accord with their fundamental nature, while man rarely rises up to the stature of his own humanity, and the far extremity of his own destiny remains unknown to him. Man alone fails to be what he is. Yet, he still cannot stoop below himself. He cannot even abandon himself and feed on wild grass with the oxen. "I could not become a beast, let alone an insect," cries Dostoyevskian man, and it is a quite genuine lamentation. Bereft of Gods and Men, the individual is consigned to eternal isolation; unable to find any real object outside of himself upon which to direct his most vital power, he would find no contentment even provided all the breadth of the creation, nor is he able to "read in the tongues of heaven the meaning of the earth," to speak with Holderlin. The real moral question is precisely this, the question of the relation between the living ego and the ideal ego, between individual man and universal humanity;
The primal commandment of philosophy, Know Thyself, assumes as its foundation the primal commandment of true morality, Be Thyself, and neither taken alone or taken individually does either precept allow us to gain any deeper understanding of ourselves. Alas, there is so much virtue in man! But so little insight. So much knowledge! But so little sanctity.

This question is given varied forms in all great philosophies. In Plato it is depicted in the relation between man’s finite bodily existence and eternal soul. With the concept of the daemonic this question, to my mind, finds at last its perfect expression and, ultimately, its resolution."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:44 am

Quote :: "The basic idea here is that man approaches so closely the divine, that the two become indistinguishable; the polynomous nothingness of the human reflects, abyssally, that of God himself.

We see that this unabsorbable excess does not lie in the ontic dimension, as a question of being, but rather lies immanently within the thinking subject itself, constitutive of its very subjectivity. Schelling names this excess "Will," in opposition to ousia or entity, being, nature."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:45 am

Quote :: "The artist is poisoned and sometimes even destroyed by that ideal which he does not bring to fruition, expression, and realization, as long as he possesses the capacity to do so: dulce tibi doluisse; breves Sol ipsa labores interdum patitur, Lunae per furta malignae. [Joannis Baptistae Santolli Operum: The sweetness of melancholy is like unto the sun, which must at times concede its sweetness be thieved upon by the night.] His very life becomes the dream and image in which all the mysteries of his depths, his longings, and his talents depict themselves and give voice to themselves and to his ideal, albeit in subtle phantasmagoria and confused, chimaeric forms, which can only confound his native genius."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:46 am

Quote :: "As it is for the cicada which emerges after its life-long slumber for one day but to sing, and then to perish, so it is for man; the intuition of death enkindles some obscure passion and intoxication, and accompanies him in his greatest happiness and triumphs. As Propertius would have it:

"That death could weary love I fear more than death;
that love's failing embers fade upon the pyre
I dread more than the railing fires
entered into my torpid frame, nor in languished death
do I dread pain, but only that the faint sting
of mortal ill could thwart the courses of love's train.
As bone survives the body burned,
love's memory survives the passion spurned
in tempered thought, by haughty passion gone remiss;
alas, the thought of love stronger than love is.
Revealed in the mirror of the flesh, flesh is returned;
love does not engender, love completes;
love does not create, love cultivates,
reaping in the germ of created things
the foretaste of another world,
and beyond the shore of death love rolls on.
For love aims to drink deep of the eternal,
and finds in mortal pleasures only a bitter draught:
alas, the longest love is not long enough,
and briefer is the longer sought."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:46 am

Quote :: "Not to be always on the ascent in spirit, but to be capable of remaining at some proud height of virtue and wisdom without tiring and falling back to earth- this distinguishes the noble intellect. For this it is necessary to nurse at least a few petty vanities and follies about oneself. The truly great minds possess always some levity in addition to their loftiness and vigor, and it is only the reveling little humming bird that has wings to fly, but also moreover to stay in place."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:46 am

Quote :: "Being unable to purify knowledge of the senses, we have demeaned it and made of knowledge a mere means to the purification of the senses themselves, a means to the "spirit.""

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:47 am

Quote :: "One is moral only beneath or above one's self, in temptation or prostration."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:47 am

Quote :: "Impersonality, or the virtue of the philosopher.-- One may indeed speak the truth, yet with the accompanying smile one nevertheless tells a lie. [Horace: Who could ever speak the truth while laughing?] Only a philosopher could accomplish the thaumaturgy of laughing with the truth. For only a philosopher is capable of making jest at the truth, that is to say, is capable of being objective, of being impersonal with the truth."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:47 am

Quote :: "The poet’s wisdom.-- When the unfulfilled and inarticulate desires of the furtive heart, carried along by the sigh of mere foretaste and shepherded under the wing of esperance, acquire the sound of beautiful music, the promise of satisfaction, enunciation, and the clarity of grief in those beholden to them, there we have poetry. The "great" poet is therefore praised because he transforms his audience into seers and poets while he himself, insofar as he is considered not as a poet but as a living being, is the most unpoetic creature of all, for the strength and clarity of his verse are commensurate with the diffidence and the confusion of his passions. Of course the greater poet can also convince himself of satisfaction and happiness (perhaps it is just this which ultimately characterizes the poet as great) just as the sullen Petrarch had done under moonlight while reading his poems to the mountains, for such can be the eloquence of his irreverent longing and desire, which is capable of intermingling upon the spindle of his ideal the most contrary threads of passion. As Seneca said: si sapis, alterum alteri misce: nec speraveris sine desperatione nec desperaveris sine spe. [It is wise to intermingle the two elements of despair and hope.] Who would doubt there is great wisdom in deceiving one’s self in this way? Who would doubt there is great wisdom in poetry?"

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:48 am

Quote :: "When Socrates named virtue happiness what he really did was what all philosophers before him had done, he named his happiness virtue."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:48 am

Quote :: "Joy often inspires us with the thought of virtue, and awakens within us the impulse to claim some duty for ourselves, but without the goad of suffering this newly enkindled passion fails to mature, and quickly perishes. It is said that despair is the mother of hope, but joy rather is so. It is despair that merely cultivates this hope and directs it upon some definite object. Thus a joyous, if sullen nature, such as belonged to Coleridge, can never bring anything to completion, and always must feel itself to be a mere wanderer over the earth. This condition is known as melancholy."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:48 am

Quote :: "The noblest egoism belongs to the philosopher, to the contemplative man who, rejoicing over the image of the world, cherishing the recollection of his loves, and enrapt with the admiration for the just and the beautiful, must one day discover that all of this vitality and this richness is not the possession of the life he has praised so well, nor of his beloved, nor of virtue; that in all of these objects of his love he has, in the end, loved only himself, only that image of himself which he cast upon them, for in and of themselves they are only nothing. Thus he bears within himself his self-consciousness as only a plaintive lament, which could well be translated: "Alas, life and world, why are you so impoverished? A pity it is that such a frail and trembling creature as me should need to exist in order to color you with beauty. A pity it is that all this beauty is not your own, a pity it is that all this beauty is mine." The man who has not experienced this lofty sadness has no business in the practice of philosophy."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:49 am

Quote :: "The impulse of daemonism.-- Our conscience and our will to knowledge spur us along by different paces, and this awkward and unseemly gait we have acquired- we name it art, that delight in deception and in appearance, in being ourselves deceived, no less by our own selves. The mere fact that man wishes to rise up against destiny, to speak with Homer, to oppugn with his bitterest invectives the objects of his knowledge, to reject what he in his heart actually knows on the behalf of thoughts of a fairer truth- all of this examples this disparity in his nature and, moreover, the fact that the two impulses, the impulse toward meaning, justice, and beauty, and that impulse toward knowledge and truth, have grown up separately, perhaps even raising their stalks out of completely separate domains in the human soul. Between these two impulses there can be found no equation, even given all the effrontery and the sophistry of a Socrates; the work of philosophy must aim to comprehend them in the terms of some higher impulse and, if this impulse is found to not exist, to inspire it."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:49 am

Quote :: "The liberty in knowledge, that mordant eye which looks into the earth as from upon a height, which thereby chooses when and upon what to direct its gaze, and when to turn its gaze away, which is never compelled as by need, danger, envy, or the thought of solace to search into things- this liberty in knowledge is called wisdom."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:49 am

Quote :: "Taking the passions individually.-- Petrarch gives us to understand the five enemies of our peace which inhabit us, which should leave us in perpetual happiness and serenity were they to be banished: avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. Yet, this is only because they, along with all of our passions, captivate us as by a cacophony, and ring out within us only in dissonance and irregularity. All spirited men know that when one such passion rings out within us individually, it always sounds like beautiful music, no matter how malignant it might be. If one gains the assistance of but a little philosophy, the passions learn how to always resolve themselves beautifully into the silence of an idea, and how harmonious and moving the music of our life then becomes, so that we are willing to meet even Petrarch's five terrors as only so many gracious and loving muses!"

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:51 am

Quote :: "Nobody has seen the full picture because there isn't one. Nor can we just go about willy nilly painting our own little pictures, inventing worlds and dreaming up fantasies. There is a goal, it is greatness. The Greek word for human being- anthropos.... Know where it comes from? Ano and opos: upward, and "eye." The word human means "The one who looks upward." The goal, insofar as it is greatness and virtue, is only a poetic obscurity- it means only to aspire to more complete humanity."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:52 am

Quote :: ""Only the philosopher, or the artist or saint or poet possessed nonetheless of a philosopher's spirit, sets before himself the sharpest, hardest limits and so gives himself over into a greater potentiality for growth and development."

This is true because that is the definition of philosophy: " Setting before one's self the hardest limit.""

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:52 am

Quote :: "No matter how much pride the philosopher may have discovered in his pursuit of the truth, he must in the end speak in this wise: "Your life that is afforded to you, is what I am, thine arrabon is my aparche; 5 namely, a breath." Under the twilight aspect of form, reason, and supposed truth has the philosopher been strengthened, as the wooded cypress, and grown more resilient in any case than we after a quite vernal nature, who needs must have the warmth and the blessing and, to speak honestly, the delight and all the rich pleasure of the passions, if we are even to live at all. Yet, the great Maya unveiled is still Maya, and the earth seen from under the aspect of eternity is still only earth, and under the eyes of a god is man still only dust. Of little consequence is it, philosophers, to trace back the errors of the flesh into the womb of reason, into the laws of necessity and the uncreated, when from the deep wells of thy own Silenic wisdom one may hear that the flesh itself is error, whose truth can only be engraved in thy breast as the consecration of thy vanity. To look upon with clear and unforgiving eyes the abject madness of the comedy of existence, or to bear with tragic intoxication that one great Silenic error and folly, namely to have lived, with all those other innumerable deceits with which it may have cheated us; are these two modes of life, that of the philosopher and that of the artist, not then equally images of the truth? While the philosophers and artists have equally presumed truth to be a rarity and truthfulness the highest difficulty, perhaps truth is only the most common of things, and silence rather the rarity.

Both modes of life- tragic self-destruction and the objective subordination to the truth, are consummated in the recognition of the world's vanity. Thus, rather silence than the truth, which is to say, we must approach truth not as something to be won but as a barrier to be overcome, a fruitful limit we impose on ourselves for the same reason poets confine themselves to a rigid meter- truth as something more valuable when it goes unsaid as opposed to said, that is, when it is treated as just that fruitful limit."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:53 am

Quote :: "Ahi qual fallo e mirar cio, che mirato
desta il desire, e col desir tormenta!
Le Stelle indarno, indarno accusa il fato
chi del proprio suo mal fabbro diventa:
Stassi al varco del ciglio in dolte aguato
amor dolce nemico, e ment ei tenta
nel cuor l ingresso, con felice inganno
ospite v entra, e vi riman tiranuo.

Oh! What an error to look still upon your image,
even after you have taken leave and given me your farewell,
for when desire is named, desire torments!
Desire, hence, what a fruitless star! Fruitlessly to accuse fate,
and her wrought smithy in the firmament,
and the circuit it hath thereby bore her to tread forever;
together she, with the beloved, in sweet ambush
confound love's vision, and makes of it a sweet enemy,
which, happy to be deceived, the heart entreats and welcomes,
again and again subject to your tyrannizing.

-- Vincenzo da Filicaia, Avvertimento ali Anima."

_________________
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*

» The Satyr Lectures