"A people is far more than just the sum of the individual characteristics possessed by each of its members. A people is an organic whole, possessing as such a distinct specificity. It differs from the mass insofar as it moves independently, with a life of its own. The mass is simply comprised of a transient plurality of isolated and rootless individuals. A people is instead a crucible by which citizens are given form. According to this ‘holistic’ perspective, democracy is a profoundly national vocation — at least when the people have the nation as its political form. Article 1 of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic proclaims, ‘The power of the state comes from the people’ (die Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus ). On this basis, it may be argued that political power is legitimate when it meets the deepest aspirations of a people and enables everyone to contribute to its history. In the fullest sense of the term, democratic consciousness is the consciousness of a people when it puts itself to the test politically as such and seeks active expression in line with the consciousness it has of itself.
Now, not only are modern liberal democracies loathe to consider the people as an organic and relatively unitary notion, but the political practices they implement contribute to dismantle the people and divide it first into factions and parties, and then into individuals who are essentially alien to each another. The fact is that liberal democracies are rooted not so much in the spirit of ancient democracy as in Christian individualism, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant spirit. In these democracies, the ‘citizen’ is not he who inhabits a history and destiny through his belonging to a given people, but rather an abstract, atemporal and universal being which, regardless of any belonging, is the holder of ‘human rights’ decreed to be inalienable. Man, exclusively defined by his ability to feel pleasure and pain, is merely ‘what makes up the population’, as Paul Veyne has written (coldly adding: ‘in the sense in which statisticians will speak of a population of microbes or even of trees’). The individual person is here reduced to narcissistic subjectivity on the basis of a principle of equality. The notion of a people gives way to the vaguer one of ‘society’. A liberal author such as Giovanni Sartori thus affirms that ‘democracy is for politics what the market system is for economics’!
‘Modern democracy’, Francesco Nitti writes, ‘is essentially American in its content and development’. It may be argued, in this respect, that its extension goes hand-in-hand with that of the Anglo-Saxon spirit. It is little wonder, therefore, that liberal democracy does away with the notion of the people (Italian popolo, German Volk), since the English language does not even have a word to describe it. The basis of modern ‘American’ democracy is both metaphysical and Christian. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 presents as ‘self-evident truths’ the ideas that ‘all men are created equal’ and that ‘they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’. Political equality here no longer derives from citizenship, but from the equal standing of all individual souls before their ‘Creator’. ‘Popular sovereignty’ becomes a mere pretence: for it is actually subject to God’s sovereignty.
It is thus easy to understand why the supporters of liberal democracy often express mistrust of the people, whose ‘power’ they nonetheless claim to acknowledge. ‘The people creates nothing at all’, Francesco Nitti proclaims, ‘it merely gathers and preserves the efforts of isolated individuals’.[45] ‘Power of the people’ then merely serves as a useful formula. As Georges Burdeau has rightly explained, ‘Revolutionary thought developed a notion of the people as committed to the protection of individual liberties. It was supported in this by the bourgeoisie, in whose interest it was to promote this notion of the people, as it would have helped assure its reign … Bourgeois thought, obsessed by the people — whose power it intuits — tends, or so it seems, to avert the threat it poses by drowning it in the abstraction of a concept which takes the edge off its dangerous nature’.
Given these conditions, there is a considerable risk that in a liberal regime democratic life may no longer be identified with that of the people, and that ‘the power of the people’ may no longer describe the power held by the citizens of the country. René Capitant has most aptly noted that ‘in an individualistic society, the idea of participation finds no space’.[47] According to liberalism, the individual comes before society and the latter is simply formed by individuals pursuing their own particular interests. This is an atomistic view of social life, which turns peoples and nations into transient superstructures that have little meaning. Now, Capitant continues, ‘the development of democracy, conceived not merely as a form of state organisation, but also as a way of relating to others, is linked in contrast to the development of the realm of organised collective action. Society in this case is no longer seen as exclusively consisting of individuals, each pursuing his own private enterprise. Rather, society here assigns increasing importance to collective enterprises that bring men together through shared work and which are not simply the combination of individual efforts: for thanks to the specialisation of those involved and the merging of their wills, these enterprises take on an organic character.’
The ‘people’s state’, which is the genuine democratic state, should therefore not be confused with the liberal state. Democracy is first and foremost a ‘-cracy’,[49] i.e., a form of power; as such, it implies authority. Liberalism is a doctrine concerned with the limitation of power and based on suspicion of authority. Democracy is a form of government and political action; liberalism, an ideology for the restriction of all government, which devalues politics in such a way as to make it dependent upon economics. Democracy is based on popular sovereignty; liberalism, on the rights of the individual.
Tocqueville, in the first volume of his work on American institutions, was the first to stress the difference between liberalism and democracy. This distinction is particularly prominent in the history of French politics. While in Britain and in the United States democracy was grafted upon liberalism, in France it is rather the opposite that occurred: we had Rousseau before Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. This is the reason why the French political system remains an essentially mixed and, in certain respects, even contradictory one. Thus the Constitution of 1791 on the one hand proclaims, in the spirit of Rousseau, that ‘the law is an expression of the general will’ (Article 6); but on the other adds that ‘all citizens have the right to contribute personally or via their representatives to its establishment’. Now, if the law is an expression of the general will, by definition it cannot be delegated. The allusion made here to ‘representatives’, which implies the delegation of sovereignty, stands in contradiction to what comes before.
In a recent work devoted to the ‘republican ideology’, Claude Nicolet has clearly illustrated the extent to which the French political tradition is removed from Anglo-Saxon liberalism. This tradition especially rejects the opposition drawn by Benjamin Constant between individual freedom and freedom as participation, as well as between civil and political society. ‘The politics of the republicans’, Nicolet writes, ‘is of an ancient sort: politics as participation in power, even when — as under the Republic — this takes place via representatives. It is not politics as the limiting of power, as for Anglo-Saxons and liberals’. As the jurist Carré de Malberg had already shown, the French political system is an État légal rather than an État de droit: it tends to ‘guarantee the supremacy of the legislative body and only entails the subordination of the administration to the laws’, whereas the État de droit implies ‘a system of limitations not only for the administrative authorities, but also for the legislative body’." [The Problem of Democracy]
What, then, are these ‘conditions’ that produce democracy, just as fire produces heat? Clearly, nowhere is this specified.
I answered that; it is an arrangement of decision makers and governing/managing bodies that developed as a result of wanting to increase efficiency in some system. Whether it be manufacturing mass products and organizing all the steps involved in the total process or dividing powers among designated branches of government. This development happens when the burden of management becomes too much to bear for smaller, centralized governing bodies. A division of labor to accomodate a greater demand for efficiency in some way for some thing, is what happens.
The politcal sphere then models the legislative process of government off the various types of democratic organizations working at the time. The very separation of powers is one such case.. a move toward a more democratic process for the purpose of eliminating some adminsitrative problem that occured without that separation.
This is an analogy to the process of manufacturing. More steps are needed to be organized to complete production, so managment powers are divided. More steps are needed to prevent political problems, so managment powers of government are divided.
Capitalism was to feudalism what egalitarianism was to oligarchy. Look at the kinds of changes made in the transition between these stages and you'll see that they both have in common a greater range of liberty for individual parts. The bigger a system gets, the more liberty must be distributed among all the parts involved in that system or it tends to have problems.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, just how I believe it came about. It was a practice put into theory, not the other way around.
'Spontaneous': when an organization occurs that is not the effect of a single, decision making process, but many, which results in a more efficient functioning of the whole body.
The free market can be called spontaneous because the demand for its content and therefore it productive capacities is not planned by any one decision, .. it happens because of very many determining factors.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
What, then, are these ‘conditions’ that produce democracy, just as fire produces heat? Clearly, nowhere is this specified.
I answered that; it is an arrangement of decision makers and governing/managing bodies that developed as a result of wanting to increase efficiency in some system. Whether it be manufacturing mass products and organizing all the steps involved in the total process or dividing powers among designated branches of government. This development happens when the burden of management becomes too much to bear for smaller, centralized governing bodies. A division of labor to accomodate a greater demand for efficiency in some way for some thing, is what happens.
The politcal sphere then models the legislative process of government off the various types of democratic organizations working at the time. The very separation of powers is one such case.. a move toward a more democratic process for the purpose of eliminating some adminsitrative problem that occured without that separation.
This is an analogy to the process of manufacturing. More steps are needed to be organized to complete production, so managment powers are divided. More steps are needed to prevent political problems, so managment powers of government are divided.
Capitalism was to feudalism what egalitarianism was to oligarchy. Look at the kinds of changes made in the transition between these stages and you'll see that they both have in common a greater range of liberty for individual parts. The bigger a system gets, the more liberty must be distributed among all the parts involved in that system or it tends to have problems.
Yes, but I'm qualifying it.
Compare it in the frame of an organic machinary of a body.
The division is a growth when the breakdown is from a strength: [N., WTP, 653, 656] explains how altruism is only really the shedding of dangerous excess that threatens to overwhelm the individual and it Re-organizes and re-shapes itself by multiplying itself as two centres of power - the 'division' of labour is actually a growth.
In the other case, the division is a proliferation when the breakdown is from weakness and incapacity towards self-organization. It collapses into many centres - this is not a growth.
Democracy was a participation without any sundering [WTP, 687], democrazy is stirnerite autonomy and breaking away was de Benoist's point, as well as mine. I qualify it because then you are able to see the possibility of a cycle... the breakdown into democracy must logically, given the right conditions, will build itself up again into a single power centre - the next phase of the evolution, before the cycle descends into the divisions of labour again. Except democracy turned into democrazy. What do we mean by 'cancerous proliferation'? A quick summary, see. esp. the last bolded:
Trickle down pity, forced by peer pressures. The extravagance of the old-school wealthy now altered to a low-key attitude, that does not invite the scorn and anger of the impoverished, upon which this wealth is built. The wealthy man is one of the people, and because he is so, one of the people can also be wealthy." [Manifesto]
Bataille wrote:
"Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without receiving. Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander." [The Accursed Share]
Satyr wrote:
"Potlatch is giving as a display....wasting resources as a way of showing that you can accumualte to waste more.
Modern systems pool energies. The individual must be shamed to give somethnig to a cause.
He is made to feel obliged...
I think this is a recent thing that differentiates it from the pagan potlatch. In the past they gave back by building monuments to their greatness.
But in modernity, instead 'philanthropic contributors' get a tax break. And because the system is made to accumualte resouces, automatically, they cannot give away enough. Marketing. Feeding into the image of humanatarianism." [Manifesto]
The pagan potlatch was connected in the Agon and the free-flow of his Thymos to his "person-ality", while the "excess return" of modern "philanthropic contributors" like Bill Gates, etc. is severed from all destructive urge that characterized the pagan potlatch and so this circulated "hoarding" has no connection to one's person-ality, but one's "character" and role-play. The modern's accursed share is unhooked from one's person-ality and deferred to a public character, his "charisma" or a universal ideal - humanitarianism, etc.
Satyr wrote:
"We might compare the Daemon as the innate self, the hidden, private self; the product of organ hierarchies creating a Personality. The public Self is the Character we play to get along, to get by.
When the first has not been permitted to develop, is retarded, the public character is the only sense of Identity we have. The tiny whisperings of the stunted personality are felt as a schizophrenic, self-consciousness - the Bicameral mind. God, as the manifestation of our nature/past, talking to us. Not, necessarily, with words, but imagery, sensations, feelings.
When the daemon is seen lurking behind dark eyes, or cowering in the background, trying to disappear from sight, the character becomes a secondary layer to the personae, the personality. The perceptions are reversed, like when you look into a mirror.
Suddenly, the outer layer recedes into the background, like a suit, and from behind it the Personality, the daemon, emerges, fragile or strong, brave or cowardly, well-nourished or undernourished and then words become something else.
The "civilized" man, in this latter instance, is a man divided in himself - his personality other than his character (the private other than the public), the idea(l) in conflict with the real.
The experience similar to that of 'lost time' as in lost awareness of self (lost self) - temporal being another word for Becoming. This "being" in the moment a metaphor for the shrinking of distances between one abstraction and the next, which constitutes the linear experience of reality as a chain of instances.
When this is intentional, or is known, then no schism is present - only control - but when the schism is actual, then the mind remains confused, unable to harmonize the different standards, the diverging world-views, into one entirety. It's impulses cannot be focused. It is duplicitous in itself - convinced by its own ruse - it says one thing and does another, justifying it after-the-fact with imaginative word-games. It is in a state of internal antagonism - personality versus character.
The detachment of the word from the world, the noumenon from the phenomenon, lends itself to this practice. The word referring to the book, the code, which may or may not refer back to a concept the mind is clear on...and it most certainly does not refer to anything sensed in the world if the concept is nihilistic. Once this detachment is achieved, the instances create voids...fissures into the emptiness, demanding linguistic selves, words of salvation.
The spirit is ripped out of the body, as a thing-in-itself, and the ephemeral finds comfort in the fabricated eternal soul." [Manifesto]
Satyr wrote:
"Luxury still determines the rank of the one who displays it, and there is no exalted rank that does not require a display. But the petty calculations of those who enjoy luxury are surpassed in every way. In wealth, what shines through the defects extends the brilliance of the sun and provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their own poverty; it is the return of life’s immensity to the truth of exuberance. This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it. In this respect, present-day society is a huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty.
The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich." [The Accurshed Share]
Satyr wrote:
"In the 'Accursed Share', Bataille makes the point, wealth was luxury expressing itself through expenditure. The wealthy man returned the resources back into the economy, back into the system, just like in nature where the dominant male eventually returned himself back into the system he emerged form and then came to dominate.
Bataille remarks current Capitalist system pools resources never completely returning them back into the system. What is returned in the form of luxury and ostentatious symbolism, is not comparable to what is retained. Slowly wealth accumulates to such proportions that no single man, or his entire family, can spend it fast enough to maintain an equilibrium...a natural balance. In nature this return of resources occurs automatically, at the dominant organism's death, or during its lifespan, as there is no way to accumulate and safeguard resources over a certain limit.
In man-made systems the entire structure is dedicated to preserving wealth and privilege, making this pooling of resources for time-spans beyond a single lifetime, depending on the stability of the system and the power of the family.
This is a miserly economic system, as it does not expend its excess energies, but saves them, expending only a small portion of them in luxury and display, or in the practice of maintaining its accumulated wealth (resources). It is an unnatural practice...resulting in sudden release of energies once control can no longer sustain itself - this is Rrevolution." [Manifesto]
In a more enriching sense, Capitalism in terms of acquisition was the will to making something proper-ly one's own - proper-ty...
Spengler wrote:
""Capitalism" is in no sense a form of economy or a "bourgeois" method of making money. It is a way of looking at things." ...the Nordic will to acquire property, will-to-power through property... "Left" is, finally and above all, lack of respect for property - although no race has so strong an instinct of possession as the Germanic, and that precisely because it has been the strongest-willed of all historical races. Will-to-possession is the Nordic meaning of life. It controls and shapes our whole history, commencing from the conquering expeditions of semi-mythical kings down to the form of the family at the present day, which dies when the idea of property fades out. Where the instinct for this is lacking, "race" is not." [The Hour of Decision, 3]
What does it mean to have Property? What does it mean to be a Master?
To be Master, means Self-Possession First. The Desire to Appropriate Yourself as Property to Yourself. Heidegger calls this Dasein - Be-ing means coming into what's Proper-ly One's Own.
US vs. Rome.
Baudrillard differentiated modern 'proliferation' from 'excess':
Baudrillard wrote:
"We are now governed not so much by growth as by growths. Ours is a society founded on proliferation, on growth which continues even though it cannot be measured against any clear goals. An excrescential society whose development is uncontrollable, occurring without regard for self-definition, where the accumulation of effects goes hand in hand with the disappearance of causes. The upshot is gross systemic congestion and malfunction caused by hypertelia - by an excess of functional imperatives, by a sort of saturation. There is no better analogy here than the metastatic process in cancer: a loss of the body's organic ground rules such that a given group of cells is able to deploy its incoercible and murderous vitality, to defy genetic programming and to proliferate endlessly.
This process is not a critical one: crisis is always a matter of causality, of an imbalance between cause and effect to which a solution will be found (or not) by attending to causes. In our case, by contrast, it is the causes themselves that are tending to disappear, tending to become indecipherable, and giving way to an intensification of processes operating in a void.
Deficiency is never a complete disaster, but saturation is fatal, for it produces a sort of tetanized inertia.
The striking thing about all present-day systems is their bloatedness: the means we have devised for handling data - communication, record-keeping, storage, production and destruction - are all in a condition of Idemonic pregnancy' (to borrow Susan Sontag's description of cancer). So lethargic are they, indeed, that they will assuredly never again serve a useful purpose. It is not we that have put an end to use-value - rather, the system itself has eliminated it through surplus production. So many things have been produced and accumulated that they can never possibly all be put to use. So many messages and signals are produced and disseminated that they can never possibly all be read. A good thing for us too - for even with the tiny portion that we do manage to absorb, we are in a state of permanent electrocution.
There is something particularly nauseating about this prodigious uselessness, about a proliferating yet hypertrophied world which cannot give birth to anything. So many reports, archives, documents - and not a single idea generated; so many plans, programmes, decisions - and not a single event precipitated; so many sophisticated weapons produced - and no war declared!
This saturation goes way beyond the surplus that Bataille spoke of; all societies have found some way to dispose of that through useless or sumptuous expense. There is no possible way for us to spend all that has been accumulated - all we have in prospect is a slow or brutal decompensation, with each factor of acceleration serving to create inertia, bringing us closer to absolute inertia. What we call crisis is in fact a foreshadowing of this absolute inertia." [The Transparency of Evil]
This is the blind and extreme potlatch... unhooked to any person-ality and spilling cancerously beyond any borders.
Deleuze can then thus speak of,
Deleuze wrote:
"Since desire produces reality, social production, with its forces and relations, is "purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions."
I'm not saying this is good or bad, just how I believe it came about. It was a practice put into theory, not the other way around.
Not every practice has natural needs. This was Gramsci's point. Since ideological communism, needs have been manufactured.
Quote :
'Spontaneous': when an organization occurs that is not the effect of a single, decision making process, but many, which results in a more efficient functioning of the whole body.
Patterns that are not discernible to the eye does not mean they lack deliberation. What does not surface up the consciousness does not mean there isn't furious activity - estimations, in the sub-strata. I get your drift though.
"Effortless effort" happens only because some law has attained a simplicity - a comprehensive logic that functions so smooth, its as that saying, a sufficiently advanced technology is as good as magic. But this is a result of hypersensitive organization - adaptation, shaping, fitness, although it may Appear as blind randomness 'clicking together'. The most efficient politics has and must have vertical values and horizontal laws. [See Sloterdijk's 'You Must Change your Life for more on that].
Quote :
The free market can be called spontaneous because the demand for its content and therefore it productive capacities is not planned by any one decision, .. it happens because of very many determining factors.
In the other case, the division is a proliferation when the breakdown is from weakness and incapacity towards self-organization. It collapses into many centres - this is not a growth.
Up to there I was following. You'll only interpret such a breakdown as a weakness if you conceive of it as a disassembling of 'self' in the first place.. as a center of action. There are far more unobservable processes of assemby and disassembly happening all the time and no real center to any of it. The observable qualites of the body are the limits of the condept of the 'self', but the body is part of a larger assembly of powers and causal interactions. The idea of the 'self' is, in a way, a confused notion in this regard. All this holds only if you insist on being absolutely metaphysical and want to talk about how bodies and forces interact to form systems within systems.
On a smaller, practical level then yeah, excess of energies to the point of a breakdown of organization and arrangement.. losing central control as it were. This is not a growth if it is approaching a terminal condition and/or death.
We're talking about democrazy, so how a system of that complexity and sophistication can be described in terms of power centers and motions of growth and decay, is more difficult. In an analogous sense, the loss of the center of power can represent the autocratic rulership that is lost to the parlimentary monarchy. The self's (autocrat) loss of control to other smaller central powers is an allegory of the absence of the control of the involuntary systems of the body, by conscious choice. From the perspective of mental awareness, this is a loss of power (capacity).. from the perspective of the entire body, it is a growth.
It all depends on where you put the 'center' of this arrangement of power when you critique a change in a system as a sign of growth or decay.
Democrazy wasn't directly related to any superfluous lose of power or organization of any fundamental center.. because there was no center politically (there are no completely defined ideologies.. they are all open), or even less ontologically.
And if you think I'm going to read all that quoting you've lost your marbles. And I'll tell you why. For every philosophical essay ever written intended to put forth an argument or explanation for something, there is another essay that will almost diametrically refute it.. but more, it will be just as convincing.
The directions we take in our philosophical development are so often the consequences of happening upon something we had no intention of finding, reading it, and almost unconsciously deciding to believe it.
Had we merely taken a right here instead of a left, who knows what we would be reading now.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I dont know if its saucy, but its certainly sassy to want to discriminate than look for patterns based on similarity.
Its like a man who drinks to lose self-control, and in the one case, he drinks to free himself to remember and in the other he frees himself to forget, to escape, to dis-affirm.
Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon Li Po
"1
Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine. No one else here, I ladle it out myself.
Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon, and facing my shadow makes friends three,
though moon has never understood wine, and shadow only trails along behind me.
Kindered a moment with moon and shadow, I've found a joy that must infuse spring:
I sing, and moon rocks back and forth; I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces. Sober, we're together and happy. Drunk, we scatter away into our own directions:
intimates forever, we'll wander carefree and meet again in Star River distances.
2
Surely, if heaven didn't love wine, there would be no Wine Star in heaven,
and if earth didn't love wine, surely there would be no Wine Spring on earth.
Heaven and earth have always loved wine, so how could loving wine shame heaven?
I hear clear wine called enlightenment, and they say murky wine is like wisdom:
once you drink enlightenment and wisdom, why go searching for gods and immortals?
Three cups and I've plumbed the great Way, a jarful and I've merged with occurrence
appearing of itself. Wine's view is lived: you can't preach doctrine to the sober.
3
It's April in Ch'ang-an, these thousand blossoms making a brocade of daylight.
Who can bear spring's lonely sorrows, who face it without wine? It's the only way.
Success or failure, life long or short: our fate's given by Changemaker at birth.
But a single cup evens out life and death, our ten thousand concerns unfathomed,
and once I'm drunk, all heaven and earth vanish, leaving me suddenly alone in bed,
forgetting that person I am even exists. Of all our joys, this must be the deepest."
I never said self is an order, but always an ordering with multiple drives each checking the other and in the strong case, stabilizing iself around least shifting centres. Getting lost in nature and fleeing to camouflage yourself is not being a free man, who's escaped "oppression" or "repression" from the system. Deleuze's rhizomatics is reactionary cowardice - flat-earthing self-erasure calling itself free radical diversity. As sure as there are benign cancers that are treatable, spotting malignancies is not being closed or narrow-minded. At some point, even feces can act as manure and turn to fragrant flowers, doesn't mean feces isn't feces, and cancer is some healthy growth.
The 'complexity' of democrazy is an outcrop of J.-Xt. hedonistic compartmentalization a.k.a. schizophrenia, leading to more and more specialization and splintering - division as depletion, not growth.
If there are other valid theories and observations of current sociological trends, post it.
I, unlike you, will read it; because my indifference is not from a careless 'dont give a damn', but ability to stay unswayed by pleasure or displeasure of all and whatever I encounter or confront.
What a happening movement… The Hooded Philosophers Clan-destine grp., and a Backwards Cap Order of sLy Assassins grp…
And Brian starts it without even knowing why or what the point is.. a li'l hint - has to do with the critical debate between Leo Strauss and Laurence Lampert.
The former was of the opinion philosophy was too dangerous to be taught to the common, as subtle concepts become gross-ened in the hands of the mob who lack the spiritual elevation to receive it in the right manner. Subtexts within Plato's texts spoke of this problem and Strauss went on to influence the Republicans towards conducting covert operations. Lampert on the other hand, was of the opinion, that N. saw the danger of hiding things… to the extent, the world became inverted and lies became truth and the very evolution and even survival of man was at stake. Keeping the world sheltered in 'sooth-sayings' and such was leading to an overall dumbing-down, and the art of Philosophy itself was dying out. He cited N. as an example of "breaking all idols" and initiating a war against all comfort that the shadow of god had kept all in. The death of god and xt. morals and man waking up again, each showing himself for what he is - world as wtp.
The HPC vids. I think are in the light of the latter. Sauwie should be able to tell you more.
Satyr has a thread on Timocracy, which he'll share if he wants to.
3. The equation, 'more complex = more efficient' is a hypothetical or in potential, and only works if the complexity is one that is beyond the hedonistic pragmatism of compromise to l.c.d. (lowest common denominators.)
Complexity is the vitality to endure a "long logic: hard to survey because of its length"... it is the Tautest bow that is tensed with nuance everywhere. The hedonist would find the fatigue painful and collapse in a simplistic yes and no and call it his simplification. One Hive Mind that solidifies plurality into a single Desire which Deleuze calls "Consistency" is marketed as so-called "Complexity" and "Diversity".
Satyr wrote:
Complexity in thought is not conducive to easy assimilation. The individual hive mind must be reduced to the level of an insect, in automated responses, and thinking, and acting, while at the same time teaching a hyper-individuality, which compensates for this loss.
This hyper-individuality of freedom-within-the-box, anything-goes-within-decided-premises that must not be questioned is a false "diversity".
4. The above line of thought is also used in Race arguments, that race-mixing breeds complexity which renders the whole efficient in futurist unknown environments…
The balance between possible and probable is a delicate one; over-emphasis on widening possibilities will thin down any vitality like anaemia. The bow loses tension. Over-emphasis on restricting probabilities will rigidify into inflexibility, unadaptability to changing environments. [Why N. said race-mixing must take the digestive capacity of a society's stomach into consideration.]
Further,
Satyr wrote:
Conflict, or the rejection of otherness, which is a part of being an individual human being, is another way of saying: friction, or internal strife, resulting in this loss of aggregate energy. To carry on with the metaphor, this loss of energy dissipates within the system as heat, which may, if the energies which are lost are large enough, result in an internal systemic overheating. The decrease in any friction caused within the unity is a necessary part in increasing the system’s total synergy. This includes, within human social unities, the elimination of anything that may cause interpersonal frictions.
For a human system (unity) it is essential to reduce all internal friction, increasing, in this way, the efficiency of the utilization of the synergies of the participating parts. Eliminating all natural distinctions is important to the wealth of the system, if it measures its own value in this way, and if it identifies with wealth or the control of resources – money being the abstraction of resources. In time, as we shall see, this elimination of natural distinction also leads to the elimination of money’s connection with anything tangible. The disconnection with reality increases to the point where money has no reference to anything material.
The market system finds its ideal in the manufacturing not of goods but of exchangeable concepts, representing services rendered or promised and yet to be rendered. Now (inter)actions become based on expectations and probabilities, rather than resources and reality.
But this is not the entire truth, because resources are in play, only they’ve been abstracted out of mind. Those who control the resources control the game, the rest play on a theoretical, idealized, Platonic level, trying to find substance in a world where it has been taken out of play."
Championing Functionality or pure pragmatism without anchoring them to discriminate ideals is asking for a progress of the lcd.
5. Conatus is not a prior and has nothing to do with those affirmative vitalities that did not need to posit God=Nature;
Nietzsche wrote:
"The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. It should be considered symptomatic when some philosophers–for example, Spinoza who was consumptive–considered the instinct of self-preservation decisive and had to see it that way; for they were individuals in conditions of distress.
That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensibly onesided doctrine of the “struggle for existence”) is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists: In this respect they belong to the “common people”; their ancestors were poor and undistinguished people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand. The whole of English Darwinism breathes something like the musty air of English overpopulation, like the smell of the distress and overcrowding of small people. But a natural scientist should come out of his human nook; and in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around growth and expansion, around power–in accordance with the will to power which is the will of life."
And Brian starts it without even knowing why or what the point is.. a li'l hint - has to do with the critical debate between Leo Strauss and Laurence Lampert.
There is no esoteric dimension to anything Plato wrote, it is not reserved for some special Straussian reader who can penetrate and decipher the text, and the liberalization of philosophy through this smashing all idols.. of which the elite, esoteric philosopher was now considered.. isn't relevant because there was no esoteric side to philosophy in the first place.
An esoteric reader is a reader who's intelligence is enough to produce a paranoid interplay of possibile meanings within a single text. All kinds of connections will be made that are not in the intentions of the writer or the text, but in the head of the reader.
I'm not going to tell you how philosophical elitism emerged in the ruling class ideologies for the purposes of maintaining a status quo, not as a means to establish some archaic discipline for systematically discovering the secrets of the universe.
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What a happening movement… The Hooded Philosophers Clan-destine grp.
Just ignore her, Fixed. She wants to get her own club going and she's jealous of yours. She has a.... well, a CHP on her shoulder.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
And Brian starts it without even knowing why or what the point is.. a li'l hint - has to do with the critical debate between Leo Strauss and Laurence Lampert.
There is no esoteric dimension to anything Plato wrote, it is not reserved for some special Straussian reader who can penetrate and decipher the text, and the liberalization of philosophy through this smashing all idols.. of which the elite, esoteric philosopher was now considered.. isn't relevant because there was no esoteric side to philosophy in the first place.
I'm not going to tell you abt. why even N. titled his Zarathustra as a book for "everybody and nobody" and adopted that selecting style to expose things or abt. the exoteric and esoteric Socrates - as in what happens when something becomes an -ism; I'm sure you know all about chinese whispers. Strauss did have a point, but it is misplaced in this age, when it has become more dangerous to not tell, than tell. My larger point being in response to your very jealous musing of Fixed's vids. (I wonder why… when you have cAnus in yours who is on par as Pezer is on theirs to make it all even..) - 'what's the point of all this…': point being, I think they think phil. problems as a movement of self-valuing must become more open in the spirit of pooling in diverse value-entities/affirmations a.k.a. 'direct democrazy', etc. A new species and band of men - The Philosophers, upon which tire, the ultimate Good Philosopher will emerge out as the cream of the crop.
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Just ignore her, Fixed. She wants to get her own club going and she's jealous of yours. She has a.... well, a CHP on her shoulder.
Doncha know me by now dimples? I like keeping it solo…w very much.
Two, or more, questions answered simultaneously. My own followed. Can't wait for the second installment of how to do "proper philosophy", and how to cultivate your interests.
