Parodites' Daemon

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:53 am

Quote :: "Above all else, man endeavors that he might at last know life, not that he might love it, and thereby abdicating that stolid post for his soul's salvation, bore in futile solitude, he avers himself this garb of flesh in the name of neither pleasure or spite, and lives neither for the sake of happiness nor for the sake of conquering pain, for he recalls that suffering of old Job, which could be assuaged neither with the promise of heaven's riches nor with anger, with neither hope, pity, or with the unseen movements of some inhuman justice, but only with awe. Indeed, it is the awe of life which is man's final comfort, not pleasure, with its vague intuitions of the earth's great bounty, nor even love, in its definite grasp, in its confidence and pious severity, nor does this last comfort lie in the mind, regardless of what the saints and philosophers might tell us- the mind, in all its vast epicycles and supernal brilliance, which is only the glint of that star which, upon the mirrored face of the sea into which it leads us, appears then so meager, and but a weary, dwindling beacon. The stillness of the uncreated, the womb of all that is yet to be and live, or truth eternal in its placidity, unmoved by the avarice of death and nature- that music of the spheres, which choirs with the wisdom of the dead and with the dreams of the forgotten, are perhaps the hopeful banners under which the unborn and the departed might bear their fate, but it is just that the living, who alone have the need of it, are alone provided the most perfect solace, namely awe, or wonder, as the Greeks so named it. Life is a dying flame, that needs must feed itself with the living earth."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:55 am

Quote :: "... the philosophical ideas are so many symbols of human incomprehension, exiguity, and fault, and to think, which means to take living consciousness of an idea, represents of itself an atonement and confession. Protracted thought has as its end the kenotic, complete division of the inner life of the individual into respective ideas. The point of departure which genius therefor claims for itself is quite irrelevant: in actuality every passion is the prophet of a more general humanity, and thought will reach its end regardless of its beginning, so long as that beginning is firm. At bottom, both the philosopher and the poet do no more than cry out to the wilderness- though, while the poet deplores the fact that the wilderness provides no answer to him, for the philosopher it is not what the wilderness says that holds any meaning, but rather the wilderness itself. The same vain and bestial cry then, which in the mouth of the poet becomes the accusation of temporality, death, and falsity, becomes in the mouth of the philosopher the very qualification of truth."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:58 am

Quote :: "The Solitary. He doesn't seek to impose his laws on others, nor does he respect the laws of others. Why try to make slaves out of beasts that cannot perform the tasks you would want performed, that cannot live up to your standard? He doesn't seek out new experiences or dangers either, and cares not for adventure. He doesn't like the herd, so he avoids it. Mostly just because he doesn't like their stink, and also because he simply enjoys being with himself more than he enjoys being with others. Unlike Nietzsche's Zarathustra, he never goes down from his mountain. Why? People come up to him, of their own accord. And he graciously offers to them some of his riches, simply because it amuses him that someone would actually make it to him and be able to scale the mountain by themselves."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:01 am

Quote :: "All very true, but by cure I mean that which would allow this daemonic process to be sustained indefinitely. As such, it is doomed. Anyone who comes down this path will go down this path, if you understand me. Without some new means of sustaining the daemonic consciousness, in and of itself it is doomed to annihilate the self, as Nietzsche was annihilated, which is worse than merely physical death. The daemonic individual continually rises and falls within different modes of existence- aesthetic, ethical, romantic, solitary, etc. The heroic-daemonic, philosophically awakened individual is continuously rising through new spheres, enlarging the circle of his consciousness. But I do not know how that heroic ethic can be practiced without exhausting one's self, so that in the end there is always a final daemonic descent, the ultimate descent, into spiritual darkness and insanity. But there must be a way to do it, there must be an answer for if there is not then I would have been unable to formulate the question.

The very thought that a philosophy could be pieced together or extrapolated and evolved from existing knowledge provokes laughter in me.

Philosophy, its noble task, is to provide an image of the world, as a totality, to unite aesthetics, morality, ethics, science, etc. Philosophy moves by leaps, in circles- spirals of circles, not a straight line of evolution to use the words of Goethe. The Selfish Gene does not do that. I, too, have a problem with people misusing words, you see. It isn't a work of philosophy, the Selfish Gene.
The only thing that has "evolved" as far as the human intellect goes is the psychological impact of philosophical ideas, and the way in which man integrates, psychologically, those ideas. The ideas themselves as I have said are generated as insoluble unities.
There is my basic premise once again, friend. The ideas of philosophy do not evolve, or change. They are immutable. I am a new Platonism. I have said it many ways, and argued it by many means, and I will continue to defend philosophy from those who would want to reduce its nobility and scope, that would aim to make it just another scholastic jigsaw puzzle.

Stop turning evolution into some metaphysical concept. What evolutionary pressure for ideas? There is no such thing. They do not influence human survival one way or another. Wars are not fought over ideas, they're fought over material things.

It is not evolutionary pressure, but the structure of human consciousness, that generates ideas, and that peculiar structure (which I have written a nearly 800 page book explaining, and spoken of as the daemonic) leads to a peculiar formation of ideas. To have a subjective existence, to possess a subjective consciousness like we do, an animal requires that particular structure. It is teleological: the only telos in all of nature. You either have that daemonic structure or you don't- if you do, you get what we humans get, a philosophizing, subjective, erotic mind. If you don't, what do you get? Just a really smart animal. That telos is the bridge that must be crossed to acquire the kind of consciousness we humans have. Any alien being that exists in space which is intellectually realized will be exactly like us in terms of its psychology.

To get to reason you have to go through the structure of consciousness and self which operates in us human beings. I, in my books, have shown how reason and philosophy depend on a particular kind of self-consciousness to be formed, a particular structure we call subjectivity.

It is not my aim to contradict it. But it ends where man begins, that is all. An end is no contradiction. To me the human intellect is the product of a structure of self-consciousness. While that structure may have been evolved, it must remain the same on any planet, any time, anywhere in order for what we call reason and intellect to emerge. When it arises, everything else is teleological. Our psychology, politics, all the philosophical ideas, etc, have all developed teologically, immutably, and by necessity, in accordance with that structure, and cannot be changed. Our human fates have been determined already. The human story, too, has already been told, in its entirety, from first to last. It's over. We must only retell it, in our own ways, comprehending in the image of universal life our particular lives. The excess, the fullness of human life, can be re-told forever. We can only, perhaps, become more aware of it, see it more clearly, as the languages we use become more and more precise. Man, it can be said, has not yet even begun to live, in that sense. I believe in true creation, in speech uninfluenced by our place in history, but I must also therefor believe in true fate, and a creation whose subject must remain the same- this human story.

Besides, you are missing the point. The human intellect does not evolve any longer. If any change occurred in the brain that altered the structure of self-consciousness I have been speaking of, we would lose our capacity to reason. The intellect is locked in its final condition. Evolution is over for it, it is done. Do you understand that? It cannot be evolved any further without being destroyed. And its development is now oriented teleologically, for reasons already mentioned. That's the point. Evolution is a process- only a process. And in man that process can go no further, it has ended. Even if you made an AI, it would need this human structure of self-consciousness to be able to reason, and only one form of intellect would be available to it, so it wouldn't be able to think any better than a human, merely faster.

Either/Or, The Gay Science, Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's Republic, Schiller's Letters, Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life. Those are works of philosophy. In those works stand united all the many regions of the human intellect, from art to morality. Those works are mirrors of human existence, as a totality. The Selfish Gene is a mediocre scholastic work. It does not accomplish the same.
Besides, until the universe itself has been proven to be the result of an evolutionary process of some kind, with other "competing" universes, I would just go ahead and keep evolution as a principle restricted to the biological sciences. It doesn't really help explain anything else, as I have noted- especially with regard to the human intellect."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:01 am

Quote :: "The task as Goethe said- of philosophy, is to rethink the same ideas, in the old Platonic sense, wedding them with our individual lives and fathoming within their image, as by a mirror, the sum of human existence, expanding it from particular to universal scope."

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

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:02 am

Quote :: "The natural range of man's affinities is very impoverished and rarely does beauty or virtue glint over his sorrowful brow. However, the few moments of aesthetic pleasure that happen to ray in upon his life he is able to extrapolate into an entire theory of the beautiful and the few moments of inspired feeling, bravery, and virtuousness which he has known he is capable of generalizing in the canon of some morality, for his eye is very well fashioned for finding out the similarity between things and the various states of the soul, and for extracting from such similarity the essence behind these things, the "knowledge." Yet, it is just this eye that makes it difficult for him to find the beautiful or the virtuous in his life and the world of living things, as opposed to his theory and morality, for greatness in all of its forms, be they the forms of the good or the beautiful, is always distinct, different, a rarity. The philosopher, on the other hand, possesses an eye attuned to the differences between things and finds in everything to which he sets this eye only so many points of distinction so that, instead of reading his knowledge into man and world, he relinquishes it as it were to the marvelous play of appearances in which they consist, which is to say he gives his spirit free reign to take each phantom for what it is and to therefor fully engage and question it. The eye of the philosopher is very much opposed to extracting that popular kind of knowledge from the images upon which it is exercised, for it cannot easily find out the point of commonality between things, and what knowledge the philosopher does have, if it can be a kind of knowledge, is by no means knowledge of the essence. Contrary to the opinion of many, it is the essence which is knowable and the appearance that is enigmatic and hard to find out, that is- the rarity, the different, and the distinct, that defy man's cunning, in which the "knowledge" of the philosopher consists, in which the philosopher finds a reversed kind of essentiality."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:02 am

Quote :: "All very true, but by cure I mean that which would allow this daemonic process to be sustained indefinitely. As such, it is doomed. Anyone who comes down this path will go down this path, if you understand me. Without some new means of sustaining the daemonic consciousness, in and of itself it is doomed to annihilate the self, as Nietzsche was annihilated, which is worse than merely physical death. The daemonic individual continually rises and falls within different modes of existence- aesthetic, ethical, romantic, solitary, etc. The heroic-daemonic, philosophically awakened individual is continuously rising through new spheres, enlarging the circle of his consciousness. But I do not know how that heroic ethic can be practiced without exhausting one's self, so that in the end there is always a final daemonic descent, the ultimate descent, into spiritual darkness and insanity. But there must be a way to do it, there must be an answer for if there is not then I would have been unable to formulate the question."

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

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:04 am

Quote :: "A question can be a consolation just as much as an answer can."

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Subject: Re: Parodites' Daemon Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:05 am

Quote :: "I admire nothing as much as I admire that old Socratic nobility, which treats the supreme truths and objects of knowledge with myth and poetry, that so acutely intellectual taste which reserves its very gaiety, excess, and liberality for precisely the gravest matters: in life just as much as in philosophy I strive for such nobility and reservation. Let this be known: we can atone for the sin of death by living well, but there can be no atonement in even death for the sin of having lived poorly. The great human being possesses in its depths a recondite logic by which it unites all the petty, shameful, or sublime things about itself. Where, in the common soul, all experiences or passions that are alien to the habitual character of one's life are either forgotten or cast away as inimical, the great nature is continually enlarged by this recondite logic- by its philosophy, and as though it were building a shell about itself, it contains more and more diverse feelings and amasses the rich store of its experience until it becomes inviolable, until its actions and very feelings are induced only by the tensions and laws within itself."

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

"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

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

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

*Become clean, my friends.*

Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA

Lyssa wrote:

Quote :: "All very true, but by cure I mean that which would allow this daemonic process to be sustained indefinitely. As such, it is doomed. Anyone who comes down this path will go down this path, if you understand me. Without some new means of sustaining the daemonic consciousness, in and of itself it is doomed to annihilate the self, as Nietzsche was annihilated, which is worse than merely physical death. The daemonic individual continually rises and falls within different modes of existence- aesthetic, ethical, romantic, solitary, etc. The heroic-daemonic, philosophically awakened individual is continuously rising through new spheres, enlarging the circle of his consciousness. But I do not know how that heroic ethic can be practiced without exhausting one's self, so that in the end there is always a final daemonic descent, the ultimate descent, into spiritual darkness and insanity. But there must be a way to do it, there must be an answer for if there is not then I would have been unable to formulate the question."

Why is it "worse"?

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And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.

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