Nobility

Referring words to phenomena means referring them to the past.
If this reference is shallow or deep determines the quality of the reference point and the subsequent projection of the object/objective, the idea(l), into the future, as an extension, a continuance of this past/nature.

A modern begins with the shallow reference and limits himself to within the conventions, the historical narratives, he was raised on.
He does not go further back, towards more self-knowledge, but limits himself to the artificiality his meme has constructed for him.
Within nihilistic Modern memes all are included, all have value, all deserve, all are equal; the concepts of race and sex are referred to the established narrative.

From this flawed starting premises all projections of idea(l)s cannot but be flawed, or detached from reality.
From a starting error in judgment in reference, only error can come.

And because error is forgiven in a system that thrives in manipulating it, no correcting consequence can ever come of it.
The idea of utility is also shaped in this context of self-supporting reproduction of delusion, self-flattering narcissism and error in judgments.
Money and the means of acquiring it, the career, the job, the utility, becomes central - a decisive standard for evaluating quality...via quantity of abstraction.

With a restricted reference to the past/nature what extends forward is a caricature, a human contrivance of varying degree of absurdity.

Money reducing concepts to a code, a unity of exchange (word, number, logos) essentially reduces man to nothing but bits and pieces.
Spirit (identity) lost in selective values determined by market forces...which, in turn, can be manipulated by toying with nature which is denied to all except to the shamans of economic welfare.
Money erasing blood...what family can withstand its destructive deconstructions?

All of nature, all of the past, can be erased with its symbolic power.
Stupidity no longer matters if you inherit or can buy into the system enough to become wealthy.
Ugliness, age, erased.
Sex meaningless, as a natural method...it now becomes a purchasable commodity.
It's meaning lost in the exchange of pleasure with no connection to what pleasure is.

The buck stops here...money for the sake of money...pleasure for its own sake...materialism as its won purpose.
Man reduced to the most immediate, the superficial, the shallow - an animal state.
It finds meaning here having lost all connectivity to its past/nature, projecting object/objectives so fantastically delusional that only a child would take them seriously...and remaining child-like, infantile, becomes a virtue.

Heraclitus wrote:

They do not understand how in being at variance it agrees with itself; backward- stretching harmonia as of bow and lyre.

The paradox expressed in the previous quote reflects the conflict between the idea(l) and the real, the subject and the object/objective, the living organism, the self-organizing, and the disorganizing, the fluctuating, and reorganizing, tending towards chaos; between the noumenon and the phenomenon, the word and the deed.

A living entity is a contradiction, a conflict (agon) trying to separate from the Flux.
This conflict sets up the resentiment, Nietzsche spoke of, when self-awareness attains a certain level of honesty and lucidity.  
Life is in constant conflict, war, against the environment that by existing (inter)acting it produces frictions, pressures, that require care, that need to be dealt with - senses as need/suffering.
The easy way to cope is to divide the noumenon from the phenomenon, so as to escape the relation, the connection, the reference that cares not for human needs and human artifices.

This division comes easy to an organism which is, itself, a contradiction to the real, evolving either/or dualities, binary methods, as the simplest form of juxtaposition.
Knowledge (data, genes), or the simplification/generalization of phenomena to a code that can then be stored is the contradiction of the real - the dynamic fluctuating reduced to a static symbol.
This is where the human mind finds it difficult to make the leap forward from representation to reality, where art takes over.
Man confuses his representation of the phenomenon, the noetic devices, methods, for the real, the phenomenon itself.
The malleability of the noumenon, since it is a human contrivance, makes it an easily manipulated tool of escape.
The phenomenon remains indifferent to human interpretations of it, but the noumenon is man's care, and it expresses a living organism's need to survive to know and understand.

The demystification of the world is aprt of secualr humanism.
In the past the problem of an indifferent, cruel, and unknowable otherness was dealt with by projecting a more real reality outside the world, or by presuming an underlying, thing-in-itself, a thingness, an absolute unity and unity...a particle, a one, a quanta...
The idea(l) that the mysterious can be absolved by assuming its knowabiltiy, is what modernity is built upon.
If the absolute particle, the fabric cannot be perceived then the universal, all-encompassing patter, directing all this chaotic fluctuations, is presumed as accessible to the human brain...right after it is assumed to exist.
Man's arrogance first presuming that he deserves eternity and a God to watch over him, as a child would, and then presuming that all that is can be known, by him...omniscience, and by extension omnipotence, accessible to man.

Man can now create his own reality, adjusting it as he proceeds towards godliness.  
Words, numbers, as representations of his abstractions (simplifications, generalizations), his tools, become universal powers which will reshape reality to his tastes.

Between the feminine nihilism (surrender to chaos, randomness, change) of the religious past, and this new masculine nihilism (projection of an absolute singular Being), the Hellenes proposed a balance - a tightrope walker's crossing in the void between the two attitudes, never going towards any one side to the end.
This state of limbo, as it were, is where existence lies...and where man's resentment and anxiety comes forth as a desire for a destination, a finality, some purpose that will end it.
This tension in the psyche between the reason (rider) and the steeds of passion.  

This is where the balance between masculine/feminine comes into play...with the male, the masculine spirit being the one who takes the reigns directing the feminine passions towards...not to end the journey but to accentuate it, deepen it and the experience.


To span the distance between noumenon and phenomenon, art must be used as a bridge, where language (including mathematics) is no more than an art-form.
This requires a counter-intuitive artistry, where the real is seen from the corner of one's eye, as it falls away, but never actually seen directly.
Art uses many methods to represent what can never be perceived completely.


Counter-intuitive, because intuition is born from a (re)action to flux, and so it is based on ordering the disordering, or finding patterns in the chaos.
Intuition can only perceive what is most like it, what is similar, and so similarity is what it thrives on, refusing to acknowledge difference, because ti indicates a contradiction.

An artist represents the phenomenon, the feeling, the sensation, knowing he can never fully capture it.
He does not replicate the phenomenon he symbolically captures its essence.
If he were to mistake his own creation for the phenomenon that inspired it he would be insane...and yet we live in a world where words are often mistaken for that which they represent, when they have no reference point outside the human mind and so they represent a pure noumenon, referring to a sensation emotion - here the artist does the reverse of what I described.
He turns the sensation the noumenon, into a phenomenon, and because he can do so, and can inspire the same sensations, emotions in the minds of those belonging to his own species, he assumes that this phenomenon refers to something outside his mind.
This is the top<>down method of thinking, expressing the nihilistic inversion, where what is missing from the world is represented, artistically, suing words, by the human brain which injects it in reality as a symbol.
If this symbol contradicts the experienced, the past/nature, the phenomena, it is nihilistic to the core; a projection based on human emotions...and the primary emotion is fear/anxiety in relation to the unknown world.

In the previous I describe how art can become a corrupting force, seducing the mind, by manipulating emotions (fear/anxiety) to detach from reality
We see it in Modern art.

A fundamental part of understanding this distance between noumenon and phenomenon, this separation of subject and object, or the discrepancy between the idea(l) and the real, is intuition.
In this case by "counter" I do not mean in opposition to, but only in opposition to the Modern understanding of what intuition is and why it evolves; an opposition to the automatic, instinctive, (re)actions with their own evolved methodology and intent.
The opposition is this tension between reasoning, or connecting words and the abstractions they symbolize (beliefs) to the world, and intuition, which is an automatic, emotional, passionate, instinctive, (re)action to stimuli - the tension the reigns produce upon the rider's hands in the Socratic metaphor representing the human psyche.  

A simple organism need not understand what it perceives.
It need only (re)act to it, usually by finding similarities which trigger these evolved automatic (re)actions.
The expected outcome is its reward...usually in the form of pleasure.
Pleasure indicates, to the primitive mind, that it did well...that it achieved and accomplished something it need not understand how or why, only enjoy the outcome which only demanded a surrender to automatic (re)activity based on a simplification/generalization it inherits as an intuitive, innate, understanding.
The primary role of consciousness is to increase survivability and so understanding need not be present if the (re)action to a phenomena results in survival.

But reason needs to understand and to do so it needs to distance itself from the survival interest, to achieve clarity.
To understand is to perceive patterns in the perceived which may or may not benefit the organism.  
This is why philosophy is a byproduct of leisure, and of minds who are comfortable enough to detach their passions, their self-interests, from what they are perceiving, or who have mastered their passions and can now direct them rather than the passions directing their reason.
In the Priestly (Abrahamic), slavish, psychological dynamic, God is placed before the rider, and the rider's inability o reign in his own passions...the priest becomes the representative of a reason which is beyond man.
Man surrenders to a noumenon...a fabrication.  

Intuition is about revealing, exposing...the phenomenon appears, to a degree, and never completely, as it is never complete but ever-changing, to the perceiving subjective mind.  
The organism reliant or organization, on order, simplifies/generalizes the phenomenon into a static thing, and then develops (re)actions to it, through trial and error - natural selection.
This is primitive intuition, where children, women, and effete males remain.  

Counter-intuitive is when these automatic intuition are comprehended as automatic, and symbolic, and the mind seeks to see beyond them.
Not to dismiss them but to place them into a more lucid context.  

So, to understand reality, beyond automatic survival methods, and intuitive (re)actions, one must take control over instincts and passions.
Not reject them but dominate them using reason.
This distancing from one's own passions, one's own automated noetic devices, is an approach towards the phenomenon.

In between the self-hatred of projecting the idea(l) into some unapproachable beyond reality, resulting in a lifetime of slavish, self-deprecating, shame, and the secular self-congratulating, "I am, already, a master of my domain, because I say so", and "I am valuable and an overman, and good, simply because I used words to call myself that" guaranteed by an all-inclusive, rel-referential, system, then defended with a passion, we have a world which is indifferent to both escapist attitudes.

The coward thinks that simply by declaring himself noble or strong, or smart, he has already taken the first step towards self-actualization.
He is master of himself, he thinks, and so I am a world upon myself...luckily no n nature/past is ever permitted to bust that delusional bubble.
He thinks he is 'free" because no external to himself standard enters his abode to disrupt his masturbation.
The walls are built and maintained by others, with his participatory offerings, and so he begins to feel liberated within their premises.

Here, he can pretend to be anything and anyone, at any time, if and only if this pretense does not disturb the other patrons from their self-gratifying personal labors.
how vengeful they become when the bubble is burst and they suddenly become exposed to a reality that does not give a flying shit about what fantasies they use to 'get-off' with themselves.
In a world where "all deserve" they, too, deserve their privacy.

Between a man's idea(l) object/objective and the real of his presence and the past he is the manifestation of, lies a world that cannot be escaped, nor ignored, unless one lives in a fortress of self-referential, communal schizophrenia, populated by simpletons and lost souls, stumbling, like zombies, here and there, desperately seeking something stable to grab onto.

If you are clever, here is where you can intervene and direct them, to and fro, because they know not where the hell they are going, or why.

The Modern buffoon stands up and pronounces himself a King, a nobleman, a spirit deserving salvation, denouncing any indifferent to his prayers objective world, outside the premises that provide him with this privilege to make such audacious claims.

Subjectivity is how human perspectivism, a weakness and an organic limit, is turned into a sanctifying libation - a expansive relief.

Who dares disturb this catholic ritual?

If King, or nobleman, meant anything more than what it means, then any idiot could find a few of his own kind to agree with the self-proclamation that he is a sovereign over something more than a small pocket of time/space, and he could, in theory, live out a life convinced, because he's convinced idiots like himself, that he is more than what he is.
If such a creature had any conscience, or any honor at all, then this lifetime would be plagued with doubts, and with a secret sense of shame, at having lived out a life using simpletons, more despicably and deplorably degenerate, than himself, to support him in this lie.

Because no matter how powerful subjectivity is in producing a detachment from reality, reality does not care.
No matter how many crowns you wear, or how many accolades those inferior to you shower you with, you remain, for an eternity, what your past made you out to be.

Nobility, like kindness, like intelligence, like dignity, is not something you can learn and then imitate, without it becoming noticeable to those who are truly it.
You can only convince those who share in your imitation, because they, too, wish for you to remain, or to at least pretend to be, convinced with their pretense.
Certain traits, associated with these terms, can only be inherited, genetically, and only faked, learned, imitated, memetically, if they are valued within the particular culture, this meme is manifesting itself through.

It's this desire to disassociate the concept, the word, from the reality of what it symbolizes, that leads to this community of pretentious imitators, living with the belief that they can be what they wish to be, simply by pretending to be it.
This is why words, representing these concepts, built upon the experienced past/nature, must be detached from a world that remains indifferent to human pretenses.

Once the detachment reaches a certain level where it can be purchased and imitated, then it equalizes all my making them consumers of the word.

Know what's sad about a clown?
It's that he laughs at those who laugh at him, forgetting that amongst them sit those few who find him pathetic for wanting to make others laugh by reducing himself to a clown.

Some find it admirable when a female raises children on her own.

There concept of "it takes a tribe" returns us back to our primate past, where one dominant male fathered offspring with a group of females, all of which cooperated in their upbringing.
The beta-male because a diversion, an ally, an inter-goup source which the female could manipulate to aid her in her internal struggles against other females, under the gaze of the alpha.
Have we not reverted back to that time?
Only this time the alpha is the institution, and all biological males, all real males, are of the beta variety.

This single mother is now bringing in stray males to make her feel female, because the real alpha has no corporeal substance to gratify her physical, and emotional needs.
children, minus a father, a "REAL" father, grow up seeking values from the only male available...the institution.
And when boys, raised by such mothers, rebel, as it is their nature to do, they turn to alternative sources of identity...finding them in pop-culture, and nihilistic escapes.

Daughters born within this environment grow up to reflect the mother's attitude towards sex and males and the world.
Sons grow up to be replacement father figures, drawing inspiration from cultural icons and superficial representations of masculinity.

And, do not be mistaken, a single mother may have a male present, because in this day and age, when all have the right to reproduce, and monogamy places a limit on feminine sexual choices, and systemic law restricts male reproduction, a present male need not be any male of quality at all.
And so single mothers seek that infantile release, that sexual release, or that 'nice guy' to fill in the vacancy.

No paternalism?
The consequences are becoming evident.

There was a time when a man was held accountable for the actions of his wife, and his children.
But we live in a shameless world of idiots and charlatans, wondering why things have turned out as they have.

Without shame  man holds himself accountable to nothing.
No, not shame before others, but shame before his idea(l)s, before his ancestors, before the kin he will father and may never meet.
To remain shameless, and then declare yourself noble, is disgusting; the epitome of modern detachment, and the shallow culture of "me".
Such psyche's find solace in remaining in the shadow of strangers.
Like females, with no father, and with no dominating male, whoring themselves from one masculine entity to another.
And with no father figure they never grow out of this phase, because only a real father would want his own son, his own blood, to surpass him and to become more than he ever could have been.

A male offer direction....even if he is a lesser man.
A female, left to her own devices, reverts to the usual natural selection game of change and of primal intuitive (re)actions, where pleasure, and emotions, and the immediate, loom supreme.

The male becomes a deified god-like idea(l) which on real man can ever match.
The personification is the idealized, the pop-cultural icon.
This cultural (memetic) representation becomes the one all real men must live up to.
Like God, this idea(l) is unattainable, resulting in shame for males and disappointment in females.
The idea(l) is unreal, fantastic... and malleable.
One idol gives way to another, in a continuous adaptation to utility or social necessities.
The female only wants a real man for the need the abstraction cannot fulfill; sexual gratification, emotional support etc. the male is reduced to a utility, a tool. She settles for him because the "abstracted" ideal male is not available – she is cynical towards all male entities.

The daughter, if she has any, will reflect her own desire to find a male to meet her idolized standards, reverting to her cynical attitude that uses men as vibrators, or providers of what the abstraction cannot provide.
She's another slut on the bar-scene, looking for a "real man” who will stand-in for an absent daddy, pregnant before she fully matures, forever looking for the father she never knew, and who never put her in-line with his idea(l)s.
There was a reason for arranged marriages.

The son, born to a weak mother, and no father, seeks a father-figure in the environment: popular culture.
There he receives the hyper-masculine displays of primal shallowness, producing good automatons.
He associates violence, cruelty, destruction, amorality, anarchy, mindless actions of all sorts, with masculinity.
Order, for him, becomes the representative of emasculation, having never been under the rule of a father directing his energies towards constructive directions.

When the masculine energy is abstracted it need not adhere to anything real.
It can detach itself from the world and become surreal, hyper-real, totally unreal.
Another hyperbole, a caricature, desperate souls can strive towards without ever approaching - shame and the mid-life crisis awaiting at the end, as a repressed rebellion against this unrealistic expectation.
Midlife crisis, for males, being a modern phenomenon no ancient ever faced.

The added factor of unfit males reproducing because of social, memetic, fitness, rather than genetic fitness, and because of the limits imposed by social conventions such as monogamy, and the masculine energy is not a guaranteed presence.
Being born with a penis and testicles does not make you masculine, and so being born to pass on your genes does not make you a father.
This title is sacred, holy, in a timeless sense.
Even here the term father is about quality, about actions, not simply using the word.
Time is the qualifier, not the self-declarative self-labeling, assertions of imbeciles wanting to find what their ancestry deny to them in others, or in words.

When lesser men get to pass on their genes, due to social and cultural conventions (meme), then the factor of masculinity present in the female, the mother, becomes a decisive factor.
If the masculine in the female is low, or is of a lesser quality, in comparison to the average, the children will reflect this absence of masculine energy.
If the female has masculine energy above the average, then the children will not suffer the consequences of this absence of a male figure.

The same can be said in regards to feminine energy, and its presence on males, father figures.
a quality father is one with the masculine and feminine present in him, with the masculine taking precedence in the father and the feminine in the mother.
If either energy is absent the children born of it will reflect this absence as a need, a longing.

The manipulation and application of symbols, metaphors signs harkens back to idolatry, where the belief that evocation, or the ritualistic repetition of words, and the usage of symbols, could affect nature, and reality at large.
Christian faith did not differ in this, and saw in idolatry, a satanic competitor to its own ritualized words, and symbols.
Satanism is this evocation of natural powers using symbols and words.
Religious rites, in general, practice the same thing.

The power of the word is found in how it may manipulate nature, not in its entirety, or directly, by through the agency of man.
The word transplants an idea(l), a belief, in the mind of the other, turning him into an active agency of that idea(l), and thusly affecting nature with his behavior.
This is the "magic" of words and rituals.
Christian magic, or Abrahamic magic (power of its rituals and words), is antagonized by the earthbound pagan magic, later placed within its own contexts as satanic, or the Devil's work.
Christian evoked power from the unreal, the beyond space/time, whereas paganism evoked natural powers, through self, and how the brain, affected by rituals and words, can influence the body.

The priest is the conjurer of magic, the institutionalized magi, legitimized by popular appeal, and not because of any other standard.
The more minds he can move, with his rituals and words, the more “true” his power becomes.
Popularity, through otherness, becomes the standard of measuring value.
If he can convince others that what he says is true then it does not matter if it is ridiculous and has no references to reality.
Any claim that uses others, or self, as the standard shares in the potential effectiveness of this inverted method of reasoning.
The world becomes more of a “problem” do be explained within the contexts being promoted as a mass belief.
Interest in reality is minimal and only in as much as it contradicts the implied power being proposed, and the mass hypnosis being magically transmitted through a subtle suggestion.    

In a secularized world the power of symbols, ritualized behavior/thinking, and of the word is still with us.
The way we name our children, the routines we repeat daily as if they were self-evidently necessary, how we greet each other, and, most importantly, how words are used to produce, and transfer a mental state, a mass movement, conjuring up images, feelings, sensations, as if by magic, on a mass scale, unprecedented in history, due to the current development of technologies, mass distribution and data sharing, all reveal the mystifying power of words.

Their power-direction is inverted, as mentioned before, because words do not affect nature but can only affect the individuals indoctrinated within a linguistic tradition and a ritualized type of living, who can then be manipulated into affecting nature with their actions.
Here words no longer describe (inter)action, but produce it.
And it can produce it on a large scale only by integrating as many minds into its "logic" as possible.
Therefore, within that context the "word comes first" because it is the foundation upon which an alternative reality can be built – to the point where the very idea of reality can only refer back to this manmade, artificial, alternate reality.
Within this context to hate man is to hate nature, reality, and to be nihilistic is to deny the existence of manmade concepts, such as meaning, and morality.

Once the logic, the method, the ritualized (re)activity, acquires the strength of numbers, all participating in it become repeating agencies, validating its "truths".
The words refer to constructs within the shared contexts, and so become self-referential; their effectiveness contained within their own premises and how they can move populations to act, and affect a reality that does not participate in their shared beliefs.
It's why quantities matter, more than qualities.
The communal synergy of all this ritualized behavior, even if based on a lie, becomes a force no quality can withstand for long.
Just look at what is happening in the middle-east with ISIS, at this moment.

The lie's effectiveness is found in how it can seduce as many helpless, desperate, inferior minds to act in alignment with its premises.
It need not have a reference outside its own paradigm – in fact the more absurd, unrealistic, it is, all the more comfort it offers to those who find the world unappetizing.

The unrealistic making it all the more attractive to those who are hurt, or insulted by reality.
Those who are called to follow are the weakest, the weakest, the one most desperate for relief.

The priest becomes a "healer" using rhythmic psalms, ritualized melodic words, as soothing balms.
The words need not be understood for them to have an effect.
Their power is accentuated by their exotic incantation.
That they are incomprehensible makes them all the more magical.

This priestly power is mysterious to the laymen, those not included in his holy order.
He gathers all the magical forces and focuses them for all to become mesmerized by the experience.

Max Scheler in Ressentiment wrote:

The “noble person” has a completely naive and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one‟s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately.
The noble man‟s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects— indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naive awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself.

I can think of two reasons why value judgments are being made - One is to convince us of our own value if we experience; if we feel, it missing within ourselves to come up with a bandaid for that pain.
The desire to create a system which tries to evaluate all things from a divine kind of viewpoint is tied to the desire to sooth the pain experienced by the 'common' man. God is the imagined thing out there which is felt missing inside said man.

The other one is to judge our relations with our environment to improve the odds of our survival which is subjectively depending on the individual and the overall situation, the environment.

In our quest to clarify the concept of "noble" we have to recognize that in the absence of absolutes the term must remain obscure, and like a beacon in the dark, a direction finder.

I've attempted to clarify the concept without losing its reality, its application within the real world, but also not compromising on its theoretical value.
One of my definitions described nobility as the spirit of being that makes of itself a conduit, a link in the chain, a spacial/temporal nexus where the past/nature and the projected object/objective, the idea(l) are aligned so that no warping, no fragmentation, no splintering off, refracted.  
The individual acts like a lens: focusing genetic light/energy so that its object/objective becomes more refined, more precise, more discriminating.

The past is not denied, contradicted, forgotten, dismissed, but focused through control.
Control is a form of order, and so it implies a decrease in possibilities.
This decrease in possibilities increases probabilities, or is a focus upon a probability.
When the lenses is not perfectly aligned with the past, with the light source, or if it attempts to redirect the light, fragmentation results in a loss of light/energy; a splintering of the spectrum.

But, perhaps, this is a bit too metaphorical.

Another way of approaching the subject of "nobility" is by associating it with the "good", changing symbols, words, to assimilate them into a unifying concept.
And what is good is what endures in a chaotic universe.

There are many ways to endure, but the only way that matters is as an organic entity, as an individual organism.
Some attempt to increase their organic endurance, their genetic endurance, by converting it into a memetic endurance....sacrificing the self to the idea(l) so as to preserve some part of self.
This is not nobility.

The alchemy of converting one essence into another is the work of magicians, and priests.
Identifying with an abstraction so as to safeguard the identity of an organic Becoming involves a contradiction of past/nature, and its replacement with a word, symbolizing a mental abstraction that has no reference point other than back in the minds of men.
If we are to use the previous metaphors, this is an implosion of mass, so as to swallow-up light in a singularity.
The lens becomes a mirror, reflecting light, not focusing it.
Light does not escape the singularity; it is absorbed into the mass of the one, which is other than the individual organism.
The individual Becoming is absorbed by the otherness - sucked in by a gravitational pull it cannot resist.
It adds itself to this mass, and finds in the association power beyond its dreams.
This is not nobility.

Neither is it noble to reinvent self by ignoring and forgetting this past/nature, wanting to level it down so as to "correct" its determining limitations.

Nobility is about endurance, tied to the Know Thyself decree, because the first thing to be endured is recognition of self as it has been determined and passed on; the endurance to accept this past/nature, without surrendering to it but neither excusing it away, or dismissing it as inapplicable.
Endurance of self, as in organism, not as idea(l).
The idea(l) is to focus this manifestation of the past/nature so as to direct it upwards, towards what surpasses the past, by building upon it, not by destroying it and burying it, to build upon the shallow surfaces.
An endurance that digs deeper and deeper into the soil, to lay its foundations, no matter what it finds there.
To build, again using the starting symbolisms, from a deep place, and straight upwards, where the alignment is near-perfect; and to build with flexibility, upon this rigid immutable, determining, past/nature, so that when the earth shakes the building can sway to compensate, without shattering.

This alignment and flexibility to endure, is what offers the potential to build higher than the others; the ones who level the earth down so as to bury a past they cannot endure, and build upon surfaces, or upon shallow foundations, most of which they truck in from other more desirable sites.
This endurance, and process of digging and making do with what is, is what imbues the spirit with humility.
A humility which can then rise up to the height of pride, built up not upon foreign foundations and shallow depths, but upon a full appreciation of what lies buried in one's own past/nature, as a starting point.

Animals, upon reaching sexual maturity will fornicate and reproduce with their parent.
They know no different, guided only by the pleasure principle; need focusing their will.
Only men can place a principle other than pleasure above and beyond gratification; only men would gladly deny self-preservation to preserve themselves intact before these principles; only men would suffer pain and misery rather than give-up on these principles, these ideals they value even more than life itself; only men want to live a life of dignity rather than a life; only men but not all men in equal measure.

Satyr wrote:

Animals, upon reaching sexual maturity will fornicate and reproduce with their parent.
They know no different, guided only by the pleasure principle; need focusing their will.
Only men can place a principle other than pleasure above and beyond gratification; only men would gladly deny self-preservation to preserve themselves intact before these principles; only men would suffer pain and misery rather than give-up on these principles, these ideals they value even more than life itself; only men want to live a life of dignity rather than a life; only men but not all men in equal measure.

Does that mean that nobility is disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense?

It would seem that those whose primary objective is survival and nothing else would be more likely to reproduce their genes because a noble man, whose primary objective are his principles, would take his own life in a certain situation that he would consider ignoble.

If so, what does it mean to test one's principles in the objective world if survival is not the objective? Does that not risk the principles becoming self-referential?

I'm not saying that I myself would always be capable and willing to do everything in order to survive... just putting forward a possible criticism.

Applying noble principles might be more efficient when it comes to reproducing memes though, as they are often awe-inspiring precisely because they rebel against nature and seek to overcome and dominate it.

It means that man as a creature that can see beyond immediate gratification, and the subjective, and cannot only be a subjective limn but can exit itself, and see itself as phenomenon among phenomena, has a level of cognition and self-awareness that makes dignity, self-respect, something above survival and pleasure.

Here, Hellenic balance must be applied, to prevent excess - the mind floating into air, becoming pure noumenon with no contact with phenomenon, pure mind with no relation to body, as opposed to body with no mind - a vegetable.

Nobility is, indeed, a disadvantage, within evolutionary (genetic term), where self-maintenance, pleasure, following the genetic code, is all that matters.
The opposite of this is a mind living in its mind, projecting ideals that have no relation to world, to genetics - such as Christianity and Value Ontology - each detaching from reality in a different way: Christianity using "love" in a mystical way, which romanticizes eros, detaching it from world, from phenomenon to convert it into a pure noumenon - the divine; the other takes "value", places it before judgment, to convert it into a divine, mystical ambiguity, applicable, arbitrarily, to anything and everything.
There are many such examples, form the many varieties of nihilism.

Nobility places women, and men on different levels of disadvantage. For a male protecting his dignity, his pride, is unaffected by what female he sues as a emans to his ends - for the female, noble one, things are more difficult, as they are easier for the base female. For a noble female being a noble means for a noble end, involved judgment, and seeking, and denying herself - a commitment to her principles which involves her rejection of immediate gratification, a male may not face.

But what nobility lacks in quantities it makes up in qualities.
all it takes is one noble birth to outweigh a million births by the degenerates, and the bovines - as one human outweighs a herd of cattle.

A quintessential trait of a noble person is the ability to feel guilt, which is internally imposed disapproval based on awareness, which is to say based on a higher, rational understanding of the world and principles founded on it. This opens up the possibility of moderating one's own behavior and preventing oneself from descending into vice/degeneracy which is a lower, animalistic state of existing, a surrender to primal urges unfiltered and uncontrolled by higher mental faculties.

About the high and low - "highness", or elevated/transcendent/rational portions of the mind are those with the ability to perceive and comprehend patterns in reality and to form accurate predictions of future events as well as functional plans on how to accomplish a desired outcome. The extent to which a mental faculty is capable of doing this, is the extent to which it can be considered "high".

Shame is externally imposed disapproval and more characteristic of the mediocre and inferior in spirit. Those who do not have the capacity to form their own understanding of the world adopt the most common/popular understanding in their group, and value themselves based on the group's approval. They have no guilt because they have no understanding of their own, they do not worry about not living up to their principles because they have none. Their only worry is how they will be viewed by others, they depend upon external approval/validation and thus the only efficient way of controlling their behavior and directing it towards functionality/virtue is by using shaming and making it clear to them that their behavior is not approved of by the group. This is how the masses are and have to be regulated if the group wants to survive. Failing to shame vice and degeneracy or worse, promoting it,  is a sure sign of the group's decline.

In the functional societies of the past a strong leader who was noble would impose higher principles upon the masses, and though masses would often not fully comprehend them, if they abide by them the result would be a strong society. Giving the masses "freedom" translates to giving them the "freedom to be degenerate" and the "freedom to fall into vice", for the masses do not possess the capacity to form their own understanding and principles, instead they merely act out their primal instincts and urges and vehemently reject anything higher (be it understanding of how the world is, or principles on how society ought to be formed) which would bring into question or seek to stop and moderate their degeneracy. Virtue is mocked and everything beautiful must be degraded to vulgarity and baseness. Nothing superior is allowed to stand out. The consequence is reality-denial noticeably present in the subjectivization of modern art and philosophy.

AutSider wrote:

A quintessential trait of a noble person is the ability to feel guilt, which is internally imposed disapproval based on awareness, which is to say based on a higher, rational understanding of the world and principles founded on it. This opens up the possibility of moderating one's own behavior and preventing oneself from descending into vice/degeneracy which is a lower, animalistic state of existing, a surrender to primal urges unfiltered and uncontrolled by higher mental faculties.

Yes....the holding of one's self accountable.

AutSider wrote:

About the high and low - "highness", or elevated/transcendent/rational portions of the mind are those with the ability to perceive and comprehend patterns in reality and to form accurate predictions of future events as well as functional plans on how to accomplish a desired outcome. The extent to which a mental faculty is capable of doing this, is the extent to which it can be considered "high".

Accountability burdened with a higher state of awareness, a stronger and more honest memory recollection.
Those who see more, and remember it, suffer more.
They see their role in the events.

AutSider wrote:

Shame is externally imposed disapproval and more characteristic of the mediocre and inferior in spirit. Those who do not have the capacity to form their own understanding of the world adopt the most common/popular understanding in their group, and value themselves based on the group's approval. They have no guilt because they have no understanding of their own, they do not worry about not living up to their principles because they have none. Their only worry is how they will be viewed by others, they depend upon external approval/validation and thus the only efficient way of controlling their behavior and directing it towards functionality/virtue is by using shaming and making it clear to them that their behavior is not approved of by the group. This is how the masses are and have to be regulated if the group wants to survive. Failing to shame vice and degeneracy or worse, promoting it,  is a sure sign of the group's decline.

Shame, and guilt, were exploited by Abrahamic religions.
They were exaggerated so as to control the shameless masses.
The shameless, those finding something to blame others of, to explain their predicament, had to be imposed, from an external source, as an accusation - sin.

All are sinners, because to ascribe a higher accountability on one, is to make him defensive.

AutSider wrote:

In the functional societies of the past a strong leader who was noble would impose higher principles upon the masses, and though masses would often not fully comprehend them, if they abide by them the result would be a strong society. Giving the masses "freedom" translates to giving them the "freedom to be degenerate" and the "freedom to fall into vice", for the masses do not possess the capacity to form their own understanding and principles, instead they merely act out their primal instincts and urges and vehemently reject anything higher (be it understanding of how the world is, or principles on how society ought to be formed) which would bring into question or seek to stop and moderate their degeneracy. Virtue is mocked and everything beautiful must be degraded to vulgarity and baseness. Nothing superior is allowed to stand out. The consequence is reality-denial noticeably present in the subjectivization of modern art and philosophy.

Yes...
I attempted to give the notion of nobility a metaphysical foundation by describing it as a straight link, with no divergence, no curbing crippling twists, between past & future.
The noble spirit is a willing link between this past, and its consequences. He accepts responsibility for what preceded his birth, as a necessary part of it, not to excuse them, or spin them into something palatable, but to convert them, through himself, into something more.

If there is one thing that I'd say defines a man, it is his tough love. It is his getting dirty, despite himself and his want for peace. It is the willingness to become violent, even when it is frightening to him, for the sake of something greater than himself. It is being responsible for the quiet, relaxing sighs of those who are less courageous to stand or less capable; despite the shrill complaining of some (or even most). And, it is doing so knowing full well the consequences for it, without deflecting responsibility for having done so. Without using an ideological absoluteness as if the action were perfectly and fully virtuous and without becoming indignant when you knew full well that others would attack you for your actions. Affirming all the ill effects which the action could have possibly caused toward your target (and others) and taking full responsibility for it, no matter how unjust those costs might be.

Nice, slaughtz.

Religion is how simpler, mediocre minds can get a glimpse of nobility. An average person may not have the intellectual capacity to reason themselves into nobility, an awareness of reality and the higher principles permeating the universe, but they may still perceive bits of it with their intuition and not having the ability to use reason to justify it, have to fall back on faith as a justification for their conclusions.

Slaughtz wrote:

If there is one thing that I'd say defines a man, it is his tough love. It is his getting dirty, despite himself and his want for peace. It is the willingness to become violent, even when it is frightening to him, for the sake of something greater than himself. It is being responsible for the quiet, relaxing sighs of those who are less courageous to stand or less capable; despite the shrill complaining of some (or even most). And, it is doing so knowing full well the consequences for it, without deflecting responsibility for having done so. Without using an ideological absoluteness as if the action were perfectly and fully virtuous and without becoming indignant when you knew full well that others would attack you for your actions. Affirming all the ill effects which the action could have possibly caused toward your target (and others) and taking full responsibility for it, no matter how unjust those costs might be.

I quote this, because many 'men' will minimize their intended benignity, but balloon - or listen to the ballooning - of their intended costs. One cannot have a wholly, worldly, just action - likewise neither wholly maleficent. The question for Western men has been intention for most cases; what is right action as an extension of what is right intention, and the ignoble ignore it.

This is not to say that the costs shouldn't be recognized, and assessed, and calculated, affirmed. If one enters a room of banshees - do not say it was unjust to be afflicted by wailing; else one says that their very birth was unjust. It is better to advance into guaranteed death having affirmed the cost, than to kill oneself from the fear of it.

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