Idiomatic Hamartia

Hello. I've chosen the name Nondas, here.

Congratulations on creating a critical and uncompromising space.  Because I've spent the last several hours pouring over your board, I would like to deliver up an infant for inspection.  I have written something which I hope may be of value, however, I have no delusions.  I am not a child; I would not post it here if I wanted bland pablum.  Be brutal.

I am a simple man and because I wanted to communicate with other simple, but intelligent, men and women, I have written essays.  I am not an academic; some college, no degree.  Because I am not a 'trained' philosopher, I have recently scanned where classic and modern philosophy stands.  My connections to their ideas (or how their ideas are perceived) may be erroneous to some.  I don't really care.  In these essays I build a simple argument, with some attempt at art, I admit, only in service to creating a narrative or sequence for a reader to follow.

*note: Satyr, if you read any of this shit; I have read through your thread on Kant.  I agree with your position there, however my terms, some of them, seem to be mirror images of your terms.  Just fyi.


idiomatic, adj. using, containing, or denoting expressions that are natural to a native speaker: distinctive idiomatic dialogue.

hamartia, n. a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero or heroine.


divine1, v. [trans.] discover (something) from guesswork or intuition.

divine2, adj. of, from, or like god or a god.  Devoted to god; sacred.


What is this I'm reading?  Natural question.  This is not a passive experience.  The thought experiments offered may challenge your perspective and your attention span.  The following essays use fiction and philosophy, in a hopefully approachable and playful way, to introduce new tools which it is hoped may help reduce some confusion in this weary world.  

The first question, then: What are the two biggest things in your life?  Each word in the question is meant to be taken literally.  

Plato and Kant seem to agree about the essential paradoxical situation of each human being; the private sense of the world we experience is essentially shut off from us or at one remove from reality.  Therefore a human being must make critical sense of life while knowing the map used will always be a representation and not the territory.

Plato's Ideas, Kant's Noumenal World or things-in-themselves, Schopenhaur's Will, and Hegel's Geist are all strikingly similiar and I will consider them all as equating to what I would call the Physical World.

Kant's Phenomenal World and Schopenhaur's Will-As-Representation agree and will serve as a start for what I am choosing to call the Metaphysical World.

Physical and Metaphysical, these two parts invariably form fundamental aspects of the human situation.  You have a physical body and a mind; the two are intimately related yet distinct.  This is not at all mysterious, but a wordy clarification that we each know intuitively.  I ask you to pardon me while I state the obvious in the service of laying the ground.  

The Passion of the Obvious.  To get anywhere in philosophy, in any discussion, one has to start somewhere.  Here we go.  What I want to suggest is a thought experiment which may help to reach into the Physical World using Metaphysical tools.

The sense signals your brain receives form a kind of map.  This map is actually quite accurate and appears to us, subjectively, as a seamless and honest reality.  However, the map is never the territory.  By the very nature of our consciousness, in that it forms maps, we can never be directly certain of the territory.  Because your mind creates a simulation, your mind is then at one remove from that-which-is-being-simulated.

To complicate matters, another insensible filter has been put in place which forms the medium and syntax of human subjectivity, namely language.  Once we absorb language as individuals we learn the set of symbols which stand for mediums of human communication.  The A-B-C song is the first level of programming, so to speak.  The letters, words, numbers, all symbols now create a labeling system for the world which invariably shapes how the world is perceived.  Now, we are working from a map of the map of the territory, all the while thinking that our minds are in direct contact with reality.

The point about language creating our individually perceived world-view and sense of identity is born out by Helen Keller's description of her conscious life prior to and after learning her first word, "water".  Prior, her undifferentiated sensorium seemed an ocean while the tiny part that was her, her mind, was as a drop of water in that ocean, unable to set any boundaries.  The moment she learned the word water, she managed to pry open the symbolic space in her mind.  Because a concept could now be "seen" in her mind and differentiated from everything else, there was now a "seer".  Once she had learned to spell water, she could go on to learn to spell Helen.  How amazing for Helen to finally meet Helen.

The alphabet and number symbols of your culture were pressed into the wet clay of your young mind and are now indelible.  

That is how we get to Kant.  Your current world view is made up of your sense perceptions, your language, your culture, your stage in life and so much more.  Kant would call this your wonderful Phenomenal World.  I put the word wonderful in to show how Kant doesn't mean phenomenal, he means as experienced, your conscious awareness, your map.

Kant's Noumenal World is the territory, the "physical reality" that all of our individual maps are trying to model.  All human science and art is a consensual Phenomenal World map of a territory, a Noumenal World territory, it cannot quite ever equal. Let me restate that with my terms.  The Physical World is the territory.  Our maps, individual and collective, constitute the Metaphysical World.

So I am going to be dealing with Physics and Metaphysics as two distinct categories, A & B.  As bizarre as these concepts might appear, they have become common place in popular culture.  Among the examples stands out the first Matrix film.  Neo's Metaphysical World is interrupted by Morpheus to reveal to him his Physical World.  Within the constraints of the medium, the analogy was quite accurate.  Kant would have loved it.

However, we have to take the next step by noticing an important characteristic: the entire discussion of both our Physics and our Metaphysics must take place in the Metaphysical World, on the map, in the matrix.

This is unsettling at first.  Why?  Because it's all lies.  Cliff hanger.

PROMETHEUS

The lame cliff-hanger ending of the last essay referred to lies. Don't be alarmed. I have not been lying to you, not maliciously anyway. Perhaps I'm only making it worse. A short fairy tale should clear this up.

Once upon a time, before there even really was time, there lived the Titans, which is a great name, you must admit: Titan! One of these Titans had his own cool name, Prometheus. The official story goes that Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind and for this he is punished1. That's one version.

Another twist on the tale, popular among the Romantic Movement artists like Rousseau, Prometheus stole the fire of the gods, came to earth, and then used it to fashion humankind itself, not only imparting the gift of fire but incorporating that fire into the human creation. In this version Prometheus is also punished.

Now, humbly, I'd like to offer my interpretation, which focuses solely on the nature of this "fire from the gods". Would this be normal fire? Not at all. The whole tale is made of fairy stuff, so this fire must be uncommon fire. What about human imagination?

The fire that humankind received from Prometheus is better imagined as the fire of imagination, the ability to create a Metaphysical World for ourselves and between us. Once a human being has seen fire, she is always able to visualize it, to imagine it. She can forever summon her own fire in her mind.

Here is where we get to the lies. That secret fire, our imagination, is a map, a simulation; it won't keep you warm. According to the quite obvious fact that the fire you are able to picture in your mind is not real Physical fire, it is a lie. The word 'fire' can only exist in the Metaphysical World and never harm you in the same way real fire burns in the Physical World. Obvious.

But that makes us all liars. Sort of. Not really. Because all of our human symbols have to exist in the Metaphysical World, otherwise they would not represent, or contrast, the Physical World. The only way to communicate anything is through very accurate and valid lies.

Don't you see! The Lie, the magical space of imagination, is the only space for all the human symbols to be visualized. When you picture something in your mind, it's not really there, it's a lie in one way, on account that it's not real. This is the only way we can ever invent anything! Before the steam engine existed, it was a lie, a ghost and a phantom. Right now, I'm going to abandon the word lie, for good reasons which I will cover later, and switch to the term Poetry.

Prometheus stole the fire of the gods, Poetry, and used it to fashion our minds. The Poetry is best when it's accurate and valid.

Right here, I'm starting to build a system, however crude, to get us organized a bit. Now that I've introduced Poetry, let me integrate it into our growing system. The Physical World exists before and supporting anyone's individual consciousness and our human personal view creates our Metaphysical World, and Poetry is the huge umbrella term for all the human knowledge in symbols about our consensual Metaphysical Worlds. Poetry is the ability and act of creating maps of the territory.

The sciences of mathematics and physics, then, would be very accurate poetry. It's reliable, testable, repeatable. Accurate, but ever-changing.

The arts, when done well, are generally found to be valid poetry. I only equivocate because of the new concept valid, which I think you've inferred already; valid means containing emotional truth, some ring of universal human harmony, some punch. Any artist will swear up and down about what I'm saying, the kernel of the work had better be human truth. That quality I've chosen to call validity.

Here at the end of my essay, we are, dear readers, in similar straights to Prometheus. He has given us the fire from the gods which is the poetry and imagination of our minds. In an eerie way, we share the fate of Prometheus, however, for our poetry can and does bring bondage and amplify suffering and provide no lasting escape. Oh dear. Perhaps the dual nature of our Poetry, that it can be accurate and valid, can help us make one more crucial step forward.

THE SWORD

Our last chat together, the essay Prometheus, left us like he was, chained to a rock, held fast in one perspective as it were, by virtue of the gap between the poetry of our map and the ever changing, unknowable territory. So this is where I introduce the next element in our story.

In a rare Romantic retelling, Prometheus is rescued by a goatherd. The goatherd gives him a sword. Prometheus uses the sword to kill the crow, break the chains and return home.

All the words in your head. So many words. For our immediate discussion, consider only the nouns. All the nouns in your head. Some of your nouns correspond to sensible, Physical, objects. Some of your nouns do not correspond; they are purely fictitious.

The ultimately unknowable Physical World (Kant's Noumenal) comes to us through our senses and our words to create our subjective Metaphysical World (Kant's Phenomenal).

Therefore, within the collective human Metaphysical World our discussion has, automatically, two poles: The Physical and The Metaphysical, or Science and Art. The focus of the first discussion is the material plane outside or outward of our awareness; The focus of the second, Art, is the immaterial plane of imagination, it's valid effect is inside our private world, inward looking insofar as how it reflects what is outside.

Again, let me use the vulgar term of lie to underscore my point: Both Science and Art must be lies, because of the map-territory paradox.

Science simply gives us a fantastic method of constantly increasing the accuracy of our accurate lies. The best examples are The Periodic Table of Elements and The Electromagnetic Spectrum. Let's consider both of the those admirably accurate statements to also include the natural laws which give them context. I am going to call this Column A and I use the term 'column' to make a future distinction from the term 'category'.

Of all the nouns in your head, many of them correspond, upon some reduction, to Column A. The quick and dirty approximate rule: if you can cut it in half, put it in a basket or put peanut butter on it, then it belongs in Column A. If you cannot, then it falls into Column B.

So then, if the ultimately unknowable Physical World is taken as Category A and our private and consensual Metaphysical World is taken as Category B, then that dual structure is echoed in our communal human discourse; Column A corresponds accurately to our Physical World while Column B corresponds with a quality of validity to our Metaphysical World.

To finish my torments of Prometheus, both the tale and analogy then, let's find out the nature of this magic sword the goatherd gave to him. The goatherd asked Prometheus one question, "Do you deserve to be punished?" The obvious answer caused him to see that the rock he thought he was chained to was sharp and actually in his hands, which were never chained to begin with. Prometheus had suffered the torment completely out of the illusion of his guilt, his gods and his traditions.

The word No is like a sword. The word No can cut very effectively; it can distinguish between this and that. Prometheus dropped the rock and was free.

More directly to the point, of each noun in your head ask the question, "Does that noun exist in the material sense? Does it correspond with Matter or the Periodic Table of Elements? Does it correspond with Energy or some part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum?" The nouns matching those conditions belong in Column A. All the other nouns in your head that do not match those conditions belong in Column B.

Why would such an exercise be useful? First I will provide an indirect reason: dividing your nouns into either Column A or B can create an interesting distinction that might reveal to you a completely different world. The direct answer deals with our mortality. Each one of us is going to die and the noun that kills you is in Column A, never Column B. In other words, the direct reason to hone a sword-like distinction between Columns is the sober reality that humans live and die in Column A.

Obviously, a noun isn't going to kill you. My point is that the thing that does the job will be in the Physical World and we will have a noun for it. That bus or bullet or tumor will have a molecular structure; you can find lead on the Table.

This distinction between Columns A & B will open a world of further exploration.

I hope you will stick around for the Ghost Stories.

ghost stories

It is with some trepidation that I set upon the task of startling and horrifying you, dear reader. My fear is not that you will mock my tale, but that you will not finish it. For the fear is only a first step and those who turn away and run madly into darkness miss out on the light. Let us light a candle then, now, to remind us to fear, but not too long...

Many adults are no longer able to distinguish reality. Scoff if you like and I don't blame you. Yet wait for the end of my story.

For the rest of my haunting tale, we will use "ghost" as something perceived by a human mind which is not physically there. Something is there, but not what the human mind perceives. The human gaze, as it were, creates the ghost in response to real physical objects.

At the primary level, this ghosting is unavoidable as part of the map-territory effect. The gap between the Physical World and the Metaphysical World causes ghosting, as it were. Alas, such is our lot. My present ghost stories concern a secondary source: the confusion between nouns in Columns A and B.

Some nouns obviously stand for more than one object or concept and each should be considered separately. Some nouns will immediately seem to belong in Column A, but after further examination, must fall into Column B.

Some nouns, "artifacts", have the property of belonging in Column A by virtue of their material existence, however these artifacts only exist in service to a Column B idea. A book or piece of art is such an artifact. The paper is real, the ink is real, but the reason for the book's existence is in service to language, which is Column B.

Language is a tool of the mind and it's machinery. Words do not exist outside of human consciousness. When you are not looking at the Exit sign, it does not say 'exit' to anyone. Only a living human being can read that sign.

So, some of our immaterial nouns correspond or stand in for matter and energy, Column A, and some of our immaterial nouns correspond to objects which only exist in the human mind, in Column B, the metaphysical. Every noun you decide belongs in Column A should be able to be described with the Electromagnetic Spectrum and the Periodic Table of Elements.

Every noun you've ever eaten when you were hungry, every noun you drink, your clothes, your house, your friends and family are all definitely in Column A. You exist in Column A. Which brings me to my scariest point.

The most horrifying aspect of our current world is the absence from philosophy of the human being, whole and entire. We are all now labeled as resources. My god, I'm not a resource! Here we are faced with deeply fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

And now that I have provoked you, I hope to provoke you further. If I placed a ten dollar note on the table and asked 100 people what the object was, 99 of them would say 'money'. I claim that they have just seen a "ghost" in the sense that the note is an artifact. The paper and ink is not seen and, even if it is recognized, still does not diminish the identification with money. However money, as a noun, cannot exist independently of other Column A nouns and in and of itself as no material substance. Money belongs in Column B.

Many of our nouns are group names. These are also ghosts. Any group of people which creates or adopts a noun is creating a ghost. What is really there in the group besides individual human beings? The building might have a large sign on the outside, but the activity and life and value is only one location: each individual participant in the group. The group name is an illusion, ultimately referring to nothing in Column A.

What am I saying? Check for yourself. Human beings live and die with and by Column A nouns, which makes them quite important. Kennedy was killed by bullets, recall.

Oh my, are we seeing ghosts all the time then, every day, all around us? Using the Column A & B distinction may reveal to your mind's eye the Physical World more closely than before. Sure, it will still be your interpretation, but your map will be more accurate, closer to the territory. Discern Column A from B, to see what is necessary and existing, because Column A is not negotiable and Column B is completely negotiable.

The assertion the Column A is not negotiable rests on the certainty, again, of two reliable witnesses: The Periodic Table of Elements and The Electromagnetic Spectrum. Matter and energy speaks for itself, so to speak. We humans divine it's characteristics and properties such as we can, as accurately as we can. Turns out, we are so damn accurate, we seem to be able to split an atom. Even that tremendous event occurs according to principles which are consistent. This is the quality of non negotiability. It is as it is and we try hard to be accurate.

Column B is entirely negotiable. Why? It's all in our heads! So is Column A, you say! Yes, but Column A has the redeeming quality of corresponding for things also existing outside your head. Not so with Column B; only fiction and imagination are needed for these nouns, chock full of terrible and beautiful human words, but immaterial.

The survival of our ancestors relied on the ability to distinguish a tiger from a shadow. Considering the shadow more real, more important, more accurate and valid over the real, living tiger could certainly prove fatal.

I will not overly spam the board. I realize that is a lot of text, but it's still wet clay. My goal was brevity mixed, hopefully, with clarity.

Have at it. Burn it down, please.

I've used different language, words, metaphors to describe similar things.

I use noumenon/phenomenon to divide the mind/body and then bring them together.
Most minds believe they've dealt with the mind/body divide, inherited through the ages, but what they've done is choose one over the other.

Those that lean towards the body, at the expense of the mind, become hedonists, materialists, rationalists, conservatives on the political spectrum, those that go the other way remain true to the Judeo-Christian ideals, and call themselves secular humanists, Marxists, Feminists and so on.
These are, for me, the two poles of nihilism: masculine/feminine corrsponding to the two ways of annulling reality, by using words, symbols, noetic abstractions that correspond to nothing outside the human brain. They are an internal geometry, a noetic universe.

I liked it.

Thank you for your time and review.

Here's another essay, taking what has been built and trying to give a context.

Spanish Prisoner

This is a long con, or a confidence scam which takes some time. As most know, a confidence scam or con is a trick to part a fool from his money. In this scenario, the mark or victim is told a tale involving a prisoner in Spain. The prisoner should be an object of sexual desire for the mark, and the prisoner should be in a foreign land, exotic for the mark. The tale is suited to the mark; if the mark desires a tall, dark-haired man, then the prisoner is just so. If the mark desires a woman, then our prisoner can now be a Spanish princess. The other half of the tale involves a fortune so large that it can hardly be believed. This feature is crucial. For the mark, the fortune should inspire visions of life-long fulfillment, security and prosperity.

You see, my friend, the prisoner has this fortune! He only needs someone to help him get out of jail or some other difficulty, a small amount, and then he has promised to reward his rescuer! Such wealth! His gratitude would be boundless!

You get the picture. She who puts up the money, gets the prince and the fortune. One or two small material "investments" on your part, and all your dreams will come true. We console ourselves that we have more wisdom; if it seems too good to be true, then it very likely is not true. Everyone knows that old trope, yet in a map-is-not-the-territory world, what seems to be true can be manipulated. What seems "too good" can be made "too good to pass up". The mark becomes a prisoner of her own fantasy. She is held in a state of expectation for something promised; she is held by her confidence.

Applying these principles to a similar confidence game, cinema, the spanish prisoner is the mark as audience. She pays her money for the ticket and pays her time to watch the film. Ultimately, she pays attention. She pays attention for the same reason our mark pays her money: to release and realize the fantasy, even if only in imagination. She pays attention and is rewarded with an erotic and fortunate experience.

Here we encounter the MacGuffin, the well known plot device which sets the story in motion. The MacGuffin is an initial object or set of conditions, usually involving crisis or danger, and serves as the premise for telling the story. In Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, the briefcase and the gold watch are both obvious examples. Both objects are special, imbued with some unique quality. The objects are also entangled in complex situations involving crisis and danger. Both objects need to be recovered; they start the story "in the control of another", as it were. The spanish prisoner again.

Perhaps the most unique quality of the MacGuffin is it's unimportance. Alfred Hitchcock was clear that, as narrator, the MacGuffin did not matter. The contents of the briefcase are never seen. The MacGuffin ultimately exists metaphysically in the mind of the mark and the audience. The MacGuffin is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. What is behind or supporting this idea?

In David Mamet's excellent film, The Spanish Prisoner, we see these two ingredients nicely mixed. The MacGuffin is the main character's scientific "formula" which will create untold wealth but is currently tied up in development with his employers. By convincing the hero that his employers want to keep his formula and rob him, the con man is able steal the formula. Here is the unique feature! The film's emotional peak, when the hero realizes he does not have the formula, is the narrative point where most stories begin. The expected resolution of the hero retrieving his formula is delivered by Mamet in the last ten minutes, as denouement. How is the hero convinced he is in trouble? How is an apparently honest man conned?

The Spanish Prisoner and MacGuffin principles can be seen in our own lives and narratives. For some goal, great or petty, we create a Macguffin and as the hero we put up some part of us, our time or talent or resources, all for the reward a hero deserves. Science, Love, Art, and Poetry are all influenced by these principles. In the same way, even this simple essay has proceeded in order: the title creates a scenario, like a carny's sign, inviting the mark to pay attention. Step right up and read the next sentence and wonders beyond your imagining will appear! Where's the MacGuffin?

Alfred Hitchcock might say, as the narrator, "Your illusions are your own, I simply wanted to tell you a tale. Thank you for participating."

magick

On the nature of words, human speech, and the creation of images and icons.

All of these essays, including this one, try to be brief and playful. Adding the 'k' to the end is only a playful distinction for the purpose of this essay. What others have meant by the use of that spelling does not concern us at all. This magick is not the ordinary concept of magic.

The magickal spell started so long ago, for us all. Long before we ourselves are capable, people are speaking all around us, casting the spell. The first incantation is known to all and often follows the same melody; your mother would sing "A - B - C - D - E - F - G." These rituals, in one crucial aspect, create a human being as we use the term. In the beginning was the word. We are all sung into existence, Metaphysically.

A shame that Descartes never met Helen Keller or read her autobiography. Before learning to speak, Helen was a clear example of us all before learning speech: Sum ergo cogito. Once the magick of language took root in Keller's mind, she then could exist in the Metaphysical World as humans do, through language. Poetic that Helen first learned the word "water", for it baptized her mind and gave birth to a new Metaphysical Being, the point of origin traced back to by Descartes. Maybe he could have seen his own baby photo and worked it out from there; I mean he's right, obviously, from the mental standpoint.

The world that we create together with our magickal felicity of language is the Metaphysical World; we can all see it, but only we humans can see it. No other living being apparently exists which can apprehend the world comprehended by humanity. As Wittgenstein points out, they don't speak the language. Some of that Metaphysical World of ours deals as directly as possible with matter and energy, Column A, by divining our environment with scientifically accurate lies. The rest of our magickal human world is about us exclusively; how we see the world and live together with each other and inside our own heads and hearts, Column B. In poetry, we don't like accurate lies; we honor the valid lies.

How incredible that you can somehow discern a system of squiggly lines into meaning! How naturally amazing that you speak and others can often understand you! This is magick. The human gaze is magickal. All the human senses, but especially those of sight and sound, manifest the multiplicity through the structure and filter of language. The senses are the magickal property here because they reach out like tendrils; they thirst in simulation and echo.

All of our magickal artifacts are dead without us. A piece of art, a book, any great symphony is nothing outside the human context, such is the magick in a living human. The same can be said for a contract or tradition or concept; anything made of human language or symbols.

A key element to any word or symbol, for the magick to work, is a frame of agreement or participation. This is both an initial recognition and a subsequent continued relationship. The subjects, ourselves, are one party of the agreement; our participation is necessary. The other party may be singular or plural, physical or fictional. However, if enough of your words become ones that only you agree on, then you will be schizophrenic. Such is the power of human magick.

That is not the fate of most. Agreeing and participating in a word or symbol not clearly understood, without reading the fine print, so to speak, is a trap. Binding contractual agreements. Sticks and stones, you might say, words can never hurt me. We shall see. I do hope you will play along.

Useful Idiot

When a human being is deceived by unclear language into treating a Column B noun as though it were more important than Column A, a useful idiot is created.

Stepping back for a moment to see the original context of this concept, a useful idiot is usually meant as someone who supports an ideology, and thereby a party, without knowing the true aims of the party leadership. In other words a sucker, and a vocal one.

We are all familiar now, in the 21st century, with sociopaths and psychopaths, human beings whether by nature or nurture are morally broken. But now I want to tell you an even scarier tale, a tale of dark magick and demons. Imagine if you dare an entity which is summoned by incantation, an entity that knows only avarice. These demons have no bodies of their own, so they must hijack the living, bending them to inhuman purposes. The demons are made of lies and on lies they feed. They have no souls so they can feel no pity, no remorse, no guilt and no joy. Enormous phantom presences which never die because they are not living. The demons have no body which is why they must be in-corpo-rated. What damnation and dark magick did they unleash when they summoned undying greed and clothed it in legal flesh? The alien invasion has progressed for a thousand years and the demons think their dominion is nigh.

Final essay, returning to the initial question: What are the two biggest things in your life?

Primacy

“Hail the Sun! Hail the Undying and Unconquered Sun!

The light of the world and the savior of humankind, Hail the Sun!”

“Worship the Earth! Praise and protect the Mother, Maiden and Crone!

To her we are born, we live and we die, Worship the Earth!”

The two biggest things in your life are the Earth and Sun.  Subtract them and you are literally nothing and nowhere.  Every atom, every calorie comes from them and them alone.  

You have never not felt them; those massive presences are your context, your being, and your time.  You are in the presence of gods, for to them, you are a moment and they will manifest another one just like you, or even better.  If we humans should be anyone's useful idiots...

Hey fucktards! Can anyone besides Satyr read on this board?

Yo Lyssa, this isn't copied and pasted, this is original!

Someone step the fuck up and give me some feedback, dammit!

...*whistles*

We all have enough of our own studying  and thinking to do. Besides, perhaps some already read your conceptions, but weren't influenced or offered enough to warrant response.
You aren't going to relate to and garner the interest of everyone.

Finally, your entitled and desperate attitude of expecting immediate attention and affirmation doesn't help your case. If anything, you are setting yourself up for provocation.

Is it real original, Non?

Sounds like a good regurgitation of someone I always copy and paste...

I threw a glance at it, and two things. On the one hand,

Nietzsche wrote:

"Preludes to science - So you believe the sciences would have emerged and
matured, if they had not been preceded by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches who with their promises and false claims created a thirst, hunger, and taste for hidden and forbidden powers?

Indeed, infinitely more has had to be promised than can ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge.

Those things which now appear to us to be preludes and exercises preparatory to science were in the past certainly not practised and felt to be any such thing.

Similarly perhaps to a distant age the whole of religion will appear as an exercise and prelude. Perhaps religion could have been the strange means of making it possible one day for a few individuals to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god and all his power of self-redemption.
Indeed - one may ask - would man ever have learned to feel hunger for himself and to find satisfaction and fullness in himse lf withou t this religious training and prehistory?

Did Prometheus first have to imagine having stolen light and pay for it before he could finally discover that he had created light by desiring light, and that not only man but also god was the work of his own hands and clay in his hands? All mere images of the sculptor - no less than delusion, theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all those who know?" [JW, 300]

On the other,

Nietzsche wrote:

"Wherever the Dionysian voice was heard, the Apollinian norm seemed suspended or destroyed. Yet it is equally true that, in those places where the first assault was withstood, the prestige and majesty of the Delphic god appeared more rigid and threatening than before. The only way I am able to view Doric art and the Doric state is as a perpetual military encampment of the Apollinian forces. An art so defiantly austere, so ringed about with fortifications--an education so military and exacting--a polity so ruthlessly cruel--could endure only in a continual state of resistance against the titanic and barbaric menace of Dionysus." [BOT, 4]

If the punishment was all (necessary) imagination, then Hamartia has no meaning to tragedy.

Nietzsche had planned to write a play on Prometheus, which was not completed. The sketch he drew, emphasized the necessity of a Zeus, of a necessary Order that could absorb "shocks". Transgressions  become meaningless when there is nothing to hold the sanctity of boundaries. In BOT, all titanic heroes real-ize that nature is double-edged, and for the cor-ruption outside, one will necessarily be shattered equally inside;

Nietzsche wrote:

"If this apotheosis of individuation is to be read in normative terms, we may infer that there is one norm only: the individual--or, more precisely, the observance of the limits of the individual: sophrosune. As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such self-control, a knowledge of self. And so we find that the aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperatives, "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much." Conversely, excess and hubris come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollinian sphere, hence as properties of the pre-Apollinian era--the age of Titans --and the extra-Apollinian world, that is to say the world of the barbarians. It was because of his Titanic love of man that Prometheus had to be devoured by vultures; it was because of his extravagant wisdom which succeeded in solving the riddle of the Sphinx that Oedipus had to be cast into a whirlpool of crime: in this fashion does the Delphic god interpret the Greek past.
It is as though the myth whispered to us that wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural crime, and that whoever, in pride of knowledge, hurls nature into the abyss of destruction, must himself experience nature's disintegration. "The edge of wisdom is turned against the wise man; wisdom is a crime committed on nature": such are the terrible words addressed to us by myth. Yet the Greek poet, like a sunbeam, touches the terrible and austere Memnon's Column of myth, which proceeds to give forth Sophoclean melodies..." [BOT, 4, 9]

Civilization stabilizes the cor-ruptions of grand criminals and boundaries are reinstated ever more tighter, and as...

Nietzsche wrote:

"A full and powerful soul not only copes with painful, even terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, insults; it emerges from such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness and, most essential of all, with a new increase in the blissfulness of love. I believe that he who has divined something of the most basic conditions for this growth in love will understand what Dante meant when he wrote over the gate of his Inferno: "I, too, was created by eternal love."" [WTP, 1030]

- the hero emerges and feels god(like) now, the ambiguity of one's self, the suspicion that one was God, was Zeus, is catharsis, the fruit of tragedy.
Tragic wisdom is the realization,

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

Primacy is the daemonic battle between not perhaps earth and sun, but sun and storm, the will to human-truth [self-preservation] and the will to truth [self-assertion], between the scientist and the artist.

Nietzsche wrote:

"Zarathustra smiled, and said: "Many a soul one will never discover, unless one first invent it."" [TSZ]

Nietzsche wrote:

"The perspective of all organic functions, all the strongest instincts of life: the force in all life that wills error; error as the precondition even of thought. Before there is "thought" there must have been "invention"; the comtruction of identical cases, of the appearance of sameness, is more primitive than the knowledge of sameness." [WTP, 544]

Nietzsche wrote:

"It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself.
The philosophical objective outlook can therefore  be a sign that will and strength are small. For strength organizes what is close and closest; "men of knowledge," who desire only to ascertain what is, are those who cannot fix anything as it ought to be.

Artists, an intermediary species: they at least fix an image of that which ought to be; they are productive, to the extent that they actually alter and transform; unlike men of knowledge, who leave everything as it is."

Have you not read the White Goddess?

Its a love triangle.

Unprovoked aggression usually signifies a historical context.
A restlessness, an impatience...a familiarity.
The focus directs.

Kicking the bee hive to get stung.

Lyssa, No. have not read the White Goddess and thanks for the review.

"If the punishment was all (necessary) imagination, then Hamartia has no meaning to tragedy."

The unnecessary use of the Prometheus myth may have clouded my meaning and, perhaps, causes the reader to focus on the wrong element. The punishment is necessary? Interesting.

Supra-Aryanist: "You aren't going to relate to and garner the interest of everyone."

Goddamnit, you're right. With people skills like mine....

And no one seems to mind that the essays above disprove the reality of money, nations, religions, or corporations?

Did I babble on too much about Prometheus and obscure the point about Column A & B? Guess so. Good to know.

I liked your Magick article, and with or without people saying so, doesn't mean that nobody had read it or appreciate it - I only did not feel a need to say a thing for I have nothing to contribute.

Lyssa, thank you for the Graves recommendation, yes, I see what you mean about the love triangle. My use of the term Poetry is not at all the same as Graves'. Yes, of course, he is on the money when it comes to Poetry in the strict sense he uses it. Not my point, not my concern.

Graves' Poetry=Poetry as in look Mom, I wrote a poem.

My Poetry=Poetry as he uses the term as well as all of Science and Art: the entire linguistic and symbolic output of the human race. All of it. And all of it is Lies.

Fuck poetry, fuck Prometheus, and fuck myth. Most of your nouns don't exist, that's what the tools given in the essays reveal. Your money, nationality, religion, and any group associations, all of it are pure fictional fantasy bullshit. Column B. And you live and die in Column A.

Strip your world clean and see it reborn.

The hamartia is the stark fact that few dare make this distinction. Nietzsche was an awesome bloke; the Great Recurrence is a wonderfully clever tool; Zarathustra is lovely white goddess loving poetry in the best sufi sense, however he never said what I said in those essays.

Yes, yes, the whole Apollonian vs Dionysian argument is wonderfully revealing, but again, not what I'm talking about. The daemonic battle you refer to is in your head, I get it. That's not what I meant by Primacy. The point of that essay is to stand on your neck and get you to squeal, yes dammit, the two biggest things in my life are the earth and sun. Those are the projection screens for your Apollo and Dionysus, for your patriarchy and matriarchy, your dominant-submissive dialectic.

OhFortunae, thanks. Glad you liked that essay.

What you must do is see the poetry in the words you use.

Satyr, are you saying that the style of my lies is not efficient? As in, why did you take 20 pages to say what could be said in 5?

No, I'm saying all language is artistic and uses metaphors.
Taken literally rather than figuratively, describing approximations of more/less probability or superior/inferior, not only in pragmatic applicability but as potential outcome.

When I say Nihilism I also mean an attitude towards words/numbers, language, metaphors, symbolism, in general.
Mythology, and spirituality, should be approached with this in mind.
In the Nihilistic paradigm the binary 1/0 is taken literally, resulting in notions of beginnings/ends and of outside/inside, transcending/immanent, and of some-thing/no-thing.
This absolutism of either/or defines the dialogue in philosophy, politics, religion, economics...science.

Ah. Be wary of either/or propositions. Yes. People keep shouting "Heads!" or "Tails!" while never considering the coin itself. Pairs-of-opposites, apparently so far apart, always rely on a rarely recognized central principle.

Thanks for expanding on that. If anything I post shows Nihilism, fire away. In an effort to be clearer, here is a distillation of the above essays:

Words don't exist. The word water does not get wet. However, some nouns do correspond to physical objects, like water. Other nouns like Sherlock do not correspond to physical objects.

The corresponding nouns are useful tools. The non-corresponding nouns can be useful, however they can also be a source of much confusion.

Is this a simplistic distinction? Yes. A simple tool used for the limited purpose of clarifying priority.

We live and die in the physical world, in the flux, if you like. Thus, the corresponding nouns are far more important, have greater priority (in a healthy mind) than any non-corresponding noun.

Water can keep you alive and kill you; religion can't. Groups, nations, corp-orations, money, credit, brands, political parties, traditions, none of these can feed you or kill you. Because they don't physically exist, non-corresponding nouns, metaphysical nouns, are thus low-priority.

In our so-called modern world, this relationship is reversed: metaphysical nouns are given priority over physical nouns. The Catholic Church is more important than a molested child. Next quarter's earnings are more important that your physical environment or your life. Some shithead might cut your head off for an invisible god.

This simple tool can dissect our consensual metaphysical world, revealing which parts deal accurately with the flux we all have to live in and which parts are just cultural bullshit mumbo-jumbo. Humans can have many cultures, obviously, but we only have one planet.

My attempt at a simple direct explanation of what is important and why might be completely flawed. That's why I bring it to critical thinkers.

Words exist as mental processes, experiences as symbols, sensations.
Words symbolize and refer to mental abstractions, noumena.
The noumenon is a construct (simplification/generalization) constructed by processing mental stimuli, translating them into formats the brain evolved to process.
It refers to a phenomenon, the apparent.
The phenomenon is a manifestation of past/nature, (inter)acting in the present (presence, which we also call reality, now, here, world etc.) but experienced after-the-fact, because the processing time required makes the abstraction a reference to the immediate past.
So, noumenon refers to a translation of stimuli produced when a phenomenon (inter)acts with a medium the organism has evolved to perceive (perceives means interacting using a sense organ evolved to translate this interaction into a form the nervous system can transmit to the brain, and the brain can process by simplifying/generalization it).

Now here is where it gets tricky.
If the brain combines abstractions in ways that refer to no phenomenon, sampling from its pool stored data, we call memory, and if it takes the outcome as literal, rather than figurative, artistic, it becomes delusional - detached from reality.
This is the beginning of solipsism, as the memetic dis-ease where the organism is purposefully placed in noetic realities so as to manipulate it.

If the words used are detached from their reference point in time/space, in phenomena, then they lose meaning- freed they can be defined in ways that contradict the experience. This is where we enter human nonsense.
This detachment form reality is what I call Nihilism, as it noetically negates the experience, of phenomena, severing the connection between noumenon and phenomenon, so as to loop it back to other noumena.
Noumena referring back to noumena.
Baudrillard described this using his own terminology as simulation of simulacrum, and it was depicted artistically in the movie The Matrix.

My position consists in the connection of Abrahamic religions (Judaism = Christianity - Islam) with modern secular humanism, via Marxism, and how they all represent a memetin, ideological, paradigm, that utilizes nihilism or this noetic detachment to control the masses, or to control humanity.
The same process occurred in the east, much earlier, and it goes through Buddhism.

I claim that this was only possible within a world of shrinking spaces and growing heterogeneous populations, necessitating a new form of inconspicuous population control which would placate the masculine elements in the species, promoting the feminine, and by nurturing genetic and memetic uniformity so as to construct an internal social harmony.

Satyr: "This is the beginning of solipsism, as the memetic dis-ease where the organism is purposefully placed in noetic realities so as to manipulate it." "Noumena referring back to noumena."

This is the aspect that seems like hamartia to me, a tragic flaw which stems from sloppy thinking and our idiomatic language. The tragic flaw of Nihilism.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify the Nihilism, as you see it.

I see the validity of targeting the ideologies you listed, but can any ideology be trusted? Is ideology itself not the source? Or is this always, as with all things, a handle-with-care situation?