A Primer on Nothingness

Keiji Nishitani, from 'Religion and Nothingness'.

"Christianity thinks in terms of a creatio ex nihilo by a God who transcends the nihility that forms the ground of the entities he creates. Atheistic existentialism, in addition to denying the existence of this God, replaces him with nihility which, as the field
of the ekstasis of self-being, is then perceived as the ground of the subject itself. Thus the nihility of creatio ex nihilo penetrates as such the place once held by God, deepens into an abyss, and then comes to appear as the ground of subjectivity. …the representation of Nothingness in nihilism… shows… the bias of objectification, of taking nothigness as some “thing” called nothingness. …From this it follows that nihility comes to be represented as something outside the existence of the self and all things, as some “thing” absolutely other than existence, some “thing” called nothigness.

…At the extreme of the freedom of the self in controlling the laws of nature, man shows the countertendency to forfeit his human nature and to mechanize it.
…Man as a subject in pursuit of his desires… behaves as if he stood outside of all law and control. The emergence of the mechanization of human life and the transformation of man into a completely rational subject in pursuit of its desires are fundamentally bound up with one another. ….In communist countries, the political institution exhibits a tendency toward totalitarianism that implies an orientation to the mechanization of institutions as well as man. In liberalist countries, the freedom of individuals under democracy is apt to be oriented to the mere freedom of the subject in pursuit of its desires.
These two differing orientations, however, derive from the same source and are bound up with one another. Here again, viewed as a whole, the problem of a mechanized civilization and political institutions can be traced back finally to one and the same source: the point from which contemporary nihilsm is being generated, whether in overt or cryptic fashion.

…Emptiness in the sense of Sunyata is emptiness only when it empties itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some “thing” that is emptiness. …In this meaning, true emptiness is not to be posited as something outside of and other than “being”. Rather, it is to be realized as something united to and self-identical with being.
…Sunyata… can be termed as a standpoint that has negated and thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the transcendence-through-negation of all being.

…Sunyata is the point at which we become manifest in our own suchness as concrete human beings… and at the same time, it is the point at which eveything around us becomes manifest in its own suchness. A boundary separates the area from another and yet at the same time belongs to both of them.

…Emptiness is the field on which an essential encounter can take place between entities normally taken to be most distantly related, even at enmity with each other, no less than between those that are most closely related. This encounter is called “essential” because it takes place at the source of existence common to the one and the other and yet at a point where each is truly itself.

…This has often been explained with the help of the ancient metaphor of waves and water. The waves that roll on one after another in endless succession all return to the one great water, which in turn swells up again into waves. No “waves” exist apart from their water, nor does “water” exist apart from its waves. Rather, at the point that water and waves are self-identical (as water-waves), this flowing wetness (suchness) emerges into reality for what it is, water there being water and waves there being waves. …Front and back appear as one. The point at which emptiness is emptied to become true emptiness is the very point at which each and every thing becomes manifest in possession of its own suchness. It is the point at which 0 degree means 360 degree. And thus, in spite of its being originally an absolute near side, or rather for that very reason, it can also be an absolute far side. For only 0 degree can at the same time be 360 degree. …Its standpoint is neither a monism nor a dualism of any sort.

…Water does not wet/wash water, nor fire burns fire… points to the central meaning of emptiness. …”Fire does not burn Fire”, Water does not wet/wash Water”, “the Eye does not see the eye”… in this sense that fire is incapable of burning fire… speaks of the ’essential’ being of fire. …It also means fire does ‘actually’ burn… expresses the essential being and actual being of fire are one. …They point directly to the “selfness” of fire. …The burning that takes place when the fire burns firewood points to the selfness of fire, but so does the fact that fire does not burn itself. The two are here one and the same. …This is the mode of being fire as fire, the self-identity of fire. Only where it does not burn itself is fire truly on its homeground. …fire is non-combustive in its very act of combustion. …a fire sustains itself while it Is in the act of burning. …Combustion has its ground in non-combustion. Because of non-combustion, combustion is combustion. The non-self-nature of fire is its home-ground of being. Self-nature is such as it is only as the self-nature of non-self-nature. …One might say that only when a thing has lost any point to be reduced to, only when it has nothing more to rely on, can it be thrown back upon itself.

…From ancient times the word “‘samadhi’ (“settling”) has been used to designate the state of mind in which a man gathers his own mind together and focusses it on a central point,… and in that sense, forgetting his ego. While the word refers in the first place to a mental state, it also applies to the mode of being of a thing in itself when it has settled into its own position. In that sense, we might call such a mode of being “samadhi-being” or being in its own position as a mode of “being in the Middle”. …They center in on themselves and do not get scattered. …To speak of the fact that fire is burning, we could say that the fire is in its fire-samadhi. …In such a mode of samadhi-being… even the ‘fact’ “it is hot” that comes to be one moment and disappears the nest is ‘absolute’ as a fact – as absolute as if it were the only fact throughout all of heaven and earth.

…In a system of being that excludes nothigness, the idea that “all beings are One” leads to the positing of a One seen as mere non-differentiation. …[wheareas] To say that being makes its appearance as something in unison with emptiness at bottom or that on the field of emptiness each thing that is becomes manifest according to its own mode of being – means that everything that showed its Form of dispersion and dissolution in nihility is once more restored to being. Each and everything that is recovers again its power of concentration for gathering itself into itself. …Each thing is restored anew to its own virtus – that individual capacity that each thing possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence.

…That is to say, on the field of sunyata, the center is everywhere. Each thing in its own selfness shows the mode of being of the center of all things. …In its mode of being as a “middle”, even the tiniest thing, to the extent that it “is”, is an “absolute center”, situated at the center of all things. …The “world”, then, is nothing but the gathering together of that “being”. …The possibility… where each thing can “be” itself by gathering itself into itself, can only be constituted on the field of sunyata.

The doing in non-doing is a doing that “does all day long without doing a single thing.” In non-doing, becoming becomes the utterfly free and spontaneous activity. …The ancients expressed a similar idea in the saying “The channel forms as the water flows.”
That is, water does not flow into a ready-made waterway called “man” but flows along freely its own way, and so makes its own waterway call ”the new man”. …It is our own self as such that is an epiphany of… the Will to Power. At its foundations the stanpoint of the Will to Power may perhaps be likened to the mystical union of Brahman and atman that we find in the ancient Indian expression about Brahman:
“That art thou” (tat tvam asi) …When Dogen says that the dropping off of body-and-mind is the practice of Zen, he seems to be suggesting the same thing. …Here “being” oneself is no different from ”becoming” oneself or from “making” a self “of” oneself. [There is no doing, we Are our Doing.]

…In virtue of what it denies, the standpoint of emptiness expressed in such phrases as
“being-sive-emptiness” or “form is emptiness and emptiness is form" transcends nihilism on the one hand, and materialism and positivism on the other. And yet to be sure, it seems to imply the possibility of bringing into higher synthesis the basic orientations and motives contained in the two opposing standpoints.”

Again with the Will to Power...eugh.

When will Nietzsche just DIE?

"This has often been explained with the help of the ancient metaphor of waves and water. The waves that roll on one after another in endless succession all return to the one great water, which in turn swells up again into its waves. No "waves" exist apart from their
water, nor does "water" exist apart from its waves. Rather, at the point that water and waves are self-identical (as water-waves), this flowing wetness emerges into reality for what it is, water there being water and waves there being waves." [Nishitani]


From Satyr's 'Interactions';

"2.1.1.1.1.5.1 A cellular membrane, or the skin, can be considered such a porous boundary – It separates the organism’s particular congruency of Flow, from the multiplicity of Flow, the Flux, so as to attain some level of self-organization(autopoiesis). It is the imprecise point at
which the organism’s Wilful control, whether it is conscious or not, meets, (inter)acts, with that of an other….with otherness."

One can say this "imprecise point" as Nothingness.

No, nothingness is not the same as imprecision.
To be imprecise is to lack an ability or an awareness....we might say that this indicates an absence or a lack which can be called nothingness, or a void, but this only applies to the mental construct and not to what it is referring to.

Let me give you a metaphor to try to explain.
When I make a movie it is made up of static pictures connected together, in a linear manner, and experienced in such a rapid flow as to reflect the fluidity of existence.
Yet, if I think or look closer, I will notice a gap between one picture and the next.
This you would call a "nothingness" or a void or an "emptiness", I would call it the byproduct of human limitations and the inherit errors of the methodology, the ideal, in relation to the real.

In reality there is no such gap, no void.....no static point anywhere, but the mind must produce it or produces it because it is dependent on static models to understand.

If we were capable to perceive all (inter)activity then the universe would be awash with light or hues of color and variations of matter on a scale we cannot even imagine.
The void is the limitation of our perception, the edge of our perceptual-event-horizon.

To me, nothingness means a place where there are no, or relatively few, things, or at least no percievable things.

I think water can exist without waves (ice), but water, and matter in general, probably can't exist without some type of movement. Even sensing water implies movement, as light particles bounce off water, effecting water, in order to hit our eyes. If it is known, it is moving. Theoretically, I think things could exist without moving, but practically they don't, at least as far as we can percieve.

eyesinthedark wrote:

I think water can exist without waves (ice), but water, and matter in general, probably can't exist without some type of movement. Even sensing water implies movement, as light particles bounce off water, effecting water, in order to hit our eyes. If it is known, it is moving.

In this case, as with all cases when language is used, "water" is a metaphor.
Water represents activity...it is not what is active it IS activity.

eyesinthedark wrote:

Theoretically, I think things could exist without moving, but practically they don't, at least as far as we can percieve.

Thing with "theretical" stuff, it is sometimes used to reverse reality, claiming an understanding which is not there.

Take the "theoretical" state of inertia, akin to God or the God particle, all it is is the mind taking the given, the dynamic, the active, and imagining, ambiguously, its opposite.
So, God is the immortal when all around you there is only mortality; He is the omnipotent, when all around you all thee is is different degrees of weakness; He is the omniscient when all around you all there is is different levels of ignorance; He is the immutable when all around nothing but mutability.

Similarly, in your mind it is theoretically possible for there to be an existence which is not active.
Here binary logic comes in handy...or is decisively limiting.
To activity you cannot help but place a negation.

Thusly, to the existent you can imagine the non-existent and then call it existing because it "exists", not as a phenomenon but as a noumenon, in your skull.
If asked to define it to show an example you will, of course, be unable to provide any...as it only exists in your mind as an idea.
And what did I say about mental abstractions?
They are simplifications/generalizations, making it possible for the mind to construct static models to represent fluid realities.

I mean, theoretically, Santa Clause is also possible. Does Santa exist in reality?
No...but he does exist as an idea(l).

Can you point to one thing which exists but is inactive or static?
I remind you that when looking at a steel bar you are not looking at any static state....but only at an activity far slower than your own or your mind's ability to perceive directly.
The steel bar is not only active in that it rests upon a moving body within an expanding universe (macro), but also because it is nothing more than electrons or theoretical superstrings vibrating (micro).

You never know, God, the soul, Elvis, being, inactivity, genuine atoms or indivisibles, linear, progressive time, finite, progressive space, noumena, and Plato's forms may be just around the corner, just out of our range of experience, although it is highly unlikely, I'm a soft atheist/naturalist, I leave a little room for the possibility of their existence, because we cannot be absolutely certain there are no absolutes, there are probably no absolutes. They probably, are fabrications of the human mind.

Satyr > No, nothingness is not the same as imprecision.

Yes, I meant to say, it is the same concept as what you denote by the words "imprecise point".

Satyr > To be imprecise is to lack an ability or an awareness....we might say that this indicates an absence or a lack which can be called nothingness, or a void, but this only applies to the mental construct and not to what it is referring to.
Let me give you a metaphor to try to explain.
When I make a movie it is made up of static pictures connected together, in a linear manner, and experienced in such a rapid flow as to reflect the fluidity of existence.
Yet, if I think or look closer, I will notice a gap between one picture and the next.
This you would call a "nothingness" or a void or an "emptiness", I would call it the byproduct of human limitations and the inherit errors of the methodology, the ideal, in relation to the real.
In reality there is no such gap, no void.....no static point anywhere, but the mind must produce it or produces it because it is dependent on static models to understand.
If we were capable to perceive all (inter)activity then the universe would be awash with light or hues of color and variations of matter on a scale we cannot even imagine.
The void is the limitation of our perception, the edge of our perceptual-event-horizon.


Yes, Nishitani says that this Nothingness is Not a some Thing which IS. I am just comparing his with yours side by side, because its interesting to have your definition and perspective of it in terms of a lack. To Nishitani and me, the juncture [although there is no juncture as such] hints at an excess that the mind is unable to perceive. There is some furious continuity/inter-activity between the wave and the water, that makes it impossible to anti-thetically separate the one from the other, and Nothingness 'is' [indicates/hints at] the excess that simultaneously holds and separates this, the flow and the flux, which the mind cannot perceive. I see it in terms of an excess because Nothingness as a concept 'hints' at what the mind cannot perceive, it reveals our limitation; Nothingness is like a dis-closure or an opening or a revelation or an excess of knowledge through which we come to know of our limitation;

"This neutrality is not somekind of grounding or basis, the background of differences and distinctions; it is located in the very midst of these distinctions as the stuff from which these distinctions are made - meaning that it exists only as an edge. This is also why the points of breaking, rapture, or crisis are often the points where, one could say, thus "stuff" becomes visible, perceptible." [Alenca Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow]
I guess it just boils down to semantics. Heidegger called this the Pelein and compared it to the Pole/Polar nature of the Polis around which everything turns and swirls forth and manifests in its suchness.

eyesinthedark wrote:

You never know, God, the soul, Elvis, being, inactivity, genuine atoms or indivisibles, linear, progressive time, finite, progressive space, noumena, and Plato's forms may be just around the corner, just out of our range of experience, although it is highly unlikely, I'm a soft atheist/naturalist, I leave a little room for the possibility of their existence, because we cannot be absolutely certain there are no absolutes, there are probably no absolutes. They probably, are fabrications of the human mind.

See how in absolutes you revert to repeat the same mind-set?

We cannot be absolutely certain, is indeed the right phrasing, as absolutes are non-existent.

But all is a matter of probabilities, not absolute certainties...degrees.....degrees....
I cannot absolutely deny the possibility of a christian God....but given the evidence, or lack thereof, my experiences and the definitions of Him, the probability is so infinitesimal that it does not even register on my "I give a shit" radar.

Lyssa wrote:

Yes, Nishitani says that this Nothingness is Not a some Thing which IS. I am just comparing his with yours side by side, because its interesting to have your definition and perspective of it in terms of a lack. To Nishitani and me, the juncture [although there is no juncture as such] hints at an excess that the mind is unable to perceive. There is some furious continuity/inter-activity between the wave and the water, that makes it impossible to anti-thetically separate the one from the other, and Nothingness 'is' [indicates/hints at] the excess that simultaneously holds and separates this, the flow and the flux, which the mind cannot perceive.

What "separates" is the human mind. Consciousness is the distinguishing agency.
This is why this trend for less discrimination is a trend towards decreased consciousness.

That which is distinguishes is a pattern amongst the chaos, or that which the mind cannot find a pattern within or that which exhibits a patters different from the one deprived...different in rate and direction of flow.
The terms full and empty are human ones. Ones which must place borders, in other words presume the absolute.
Therefore even the terms lack and overflowing excess are metaphors.

The deciding factor in choosing one over the other, in my case, is human experience.
We are a manifestation of that which we can only perceive in fragments and by simplifying it.
What do we experience as existing: we feel an insatiable lack.
We cannot dismiss is as accidental or as some test of our virtue.

When we do feel excess energies it is after accumulation and successful maintenance. Excess is felt as what is left-over once the need in us is satiated, temporarily...and this is also why in the west we live in a culture of excess.

Lyssa wrote:

"This neutrality is not somekind of grounding or basis, the background of differences and distinctions; it is located in the very midst of these distinctions as the stuff from which these distinctions are made - meaning that it exists only as an edge. This is also why the points of breaking, rapture, or crisis are often the points where, one could say, thus "stuff" becomes visible, perceptible." [Alenca Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow]
I guess it just boils down to semantics. Heidegger called this the Pelein and compared it to the Pole/Polar nature of the Polis around which everything turns and swirls forth and manifests in its suchness.

Listen, the mind needs a static point and its opposite to contain his thoughts.

Negative/Positive are polar opposites with no definite definition and no place in space/time.
They are metaphorical projections of a hypothetical. simplified, absolute, within which or in between which man places his multifarious perceptions and categorizes them.
This is a methodology trying to encompass reality...it is a towards power (omnipotence) or towards omniscience.

Satyr> What do we experience as existing: we feel an insatiable lack.
We cannot dismiss is as accidental or as some test of our virtue.
When we do feel excess energies it is after accumulation and successful maintenance. Excess is felt as what is left-over once the need in us is satiated, temporarily...

My point of departure is, we feel a lack because we primarily are energy expending and self-flourishing creatures. That which is strong thrusts out, wanting to become more than what it is assimilating what is weak. The self-overcoming is the self always trying to exceed itself by assimilating something, and in this, expends its energy and feels a lack, that drives it to seek more resistances which again it can assimilate, or in turn be assimilated by an entity even stronger than it.


Satyr> Listen, the mind needs a static point and its opposite to contain his thoughts.

I'm trying; Nothingness is a mental construct by consciousness to simultaneously conceive different rates of flow interacting continuously with the flux; while consciousness itself is part of the flux resisting a part of itself as flow.

Lyssa wrote:

My point of departure is, we feel a lack because we primarily are energy expending and self-flourishing creatures.

Very good...and this depleting energy once expended returns the organism to its original state: need.

But you begin with satiation...not with what makes it necessary.
Furthermore, life, according to moi, is a reaction to increasing entropy....so it is organizing agaisnt the disorganizing...or a unifying process resisting fragmentation.

What is lacking?
Order, the absolute kind.
Other words for it, describing the same absent absolute: perfect, whole, one, self, omnipotence, omniscience, stable, unity, particle, atom, substance, God.
Language, including math, because it depends on artificial absolutes (abstractions, noumena, mentla models) is full of such similies and tautologies, pretending to be referring to something other than the exact same concept.

Lyssa wrote:

That which is strong thrusts out, wanting to become more than what it is assimilating what is weak.

Exactly, and so weakness is the starting point, it is what makes this need to thrust out possible.
There fore strength, power, is not an overflowing of omnipotence, but a reaction to increasing weakness (old age, for example; attrition in a non-biological context), or a degree of it trying to "correct" its lack.

Growth, creativity, pro-creativity, becomes this accumulation and then expenditure of energies; it is an indication of worthiness.
That emergent unity which manages to accumulate, after it has dealt with its immediate requirements, enough energies to grow and then to procreate and then, in the case of man, to create, is doing so as a display, a byproduct, of his fitness.
It is because he can deal with his needs and produce excesses that make it possible for him to expend this overflow.

Lyssa wrote:

The self-overcoming is the self always trying to exceed itself by assimilating something, and in this, expends its energy and feels a lack, that drives it to seek more resistances which again it can assimilate, or in turn be assimilated by an entity even stronger than it.

Yes.
Herein lies the difference between feminine and masculine methods.
The female wishes to belong, to be assimilated, to pull in and be a conduit for the replication of what is above her, or what is more ordered (more symmetrical); the male wishes to assimilate, select, impregnate his essence usurping the will of the one who accepts. The woman is for him a means; a resource.
A woman wishes to meld into the other, disappear within it unite with it to produce something better.
A woman seeks the ideal, a man proposes himself as one; a female seeks out God to surrender to, a male wants to be God and have all surrender to him.

Both, are essential nihilistic if pushed to an extreme. Ergo a Hellenic balance, a controlled ascetic demeanor is required to not deny the feminine but to control it.
If there be an ideal man, then he is just as much in touch with his feminine side as he is in dominion over it.

The effete male is taken over by his femininity; the macho man is brutish and unsophisticated, a beast.

Satyr> ...and this depleting energy once expended returns the organism to its original state: need.

Need, because it'd expended, excess being its original state.

Satyr> Furthermore, life, according to moi, is a reaction to increasing entropy....so it is organizing agaisnt the disorganizing...or a unifying process resisting fragmentation.

Ok, I get your p.o.v.
To me, life is both that which resists entropy but Is itself also entropy. When the strong appropriates the weak which is unable to resist it, the Strong appears as an Entropic force to the weak. Life is both creative order and destruction, chaos.

Satyr> But you begin with satiation...not with what makes it necessary.
...Exactly, and so weakness is the starting point, it is what makes this need to thrust out possible. There fore strength, power, is not an overflowing of omnipotence, but a reaction to increasing weakness (old age, for example; attrition in a non-biological context), or a degree of it trying to "correct" its lack.

Life everywhere wants to grow and become other than what it is; it wants to discharge and propel out. Its not concerned primarily with preserving itself.
The exhaustion of the strong and the exhaustion of the weak are different; in the former, because the overflowing state has been expended, and in the latter, because it is unable to approp. and accumulate new resources for its growth to be other than what it is. In both cases, Life always wants to exceed itself.
Your starting point is one kind of exhaustion, and mine is the other; because, I say this poetically - the very fact that there is Life hints at the excess instinct in death/disorder which wants to exceed itself [not as aim or purpose though]. Life is a degree of becoming of death/disorder. The joy of being-in-becoming is more primal than the pain of preserving itself. Life is an overflowing - for me.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> ...and this depleting energy once expended returns the organism to its original state: need.

Need, because it'd expended, excess being its original state.

Reproduction is a result of accumulated energies so the organism begins, due to its inheritance, with a surplus, and this is then defended by the mother until it can deal with its own needs.

No doubt the start of life must have been a product of a regional excess in energies, but that life is so rare suggests that this is, and is becoming increasingly so, an exception to the rule.

Lyssa wrote:

Ok, I get your p.o.v.
To me, life is both that which resists entropy but Is itself also entropy.

Of course it is also a part of reality which is characterized by increasing entropy.
This is why this desire, this intuitive attraction to surrender is a result of all flow being governed by "the-path-of-least-resistance".
To die is easy, to resist dying, which is what living is, entails effort, and struggle and so it results in the sensation of need/suffering.

Lyssa wrote:

When the strong appropriates the weak which is unable to resist it, the Strong appears as an Entropic force to the weak. Life is both creative order and destruction, chaos.

And so this linear dynamic towards fragmentation, increasing entropy, appears or is interpreted by the weak, because we are all weakl to varying degrees, as a greater power. this can then be imagined as a God or as an absolute which promises finality: the merger of the weak with its imagined, projected, hoped for, absolute, omnipotent, perfection.
This is why the masculine spirit is a spirit of battling agaisnt a greater foe. The spirit of resisting despite the incoming loss; nobility.
To live, for a short time, as a man, as a being yet to be, destined never to be, proud to be in perpetual Becoming.

Is this not your Nietzsche's overman?

The hero who laughs at his own condition.

Lyssa wrote:

Life everywhere wants to grow and become other than what it is; it wants to discharge and propel out.

No life everywhere is a resitance to entorpy, it self-maintains, and only wiht the escess it produces does it seek to increase this resistance. You are seeing the succesful organisms forgetting the myriads that perish constantly...well unless a Will steps in, like man, to protect them.
Despite this resistance entropy continues to increase putting more burdens or those that live. A counter-reaction from the living is to bond and bind into greater organisms, with more energies at their disposal and with the benefits of synergy at hand.

Lyssa wrote:

Its not concerned primarily with preserving itself.

This is laughable.
If it is not, as you say concerned with preserving self, then it loses all concern, it loses all possibility, it loses self.
In order to even hope and think and project the organism must first take care with preserving itself. It is nothing without this first concern; this is why a life is always selfish. It is full of self, before it can even have to option of sacrificing self.

Lyssa wrote:

The exhaustion of the strong and the exhaustion of the weak are different; in the former, because the overflowing state has been expended, and in the latter, because it is unable to approp. and accumulate new resources for its growth to be other than what it is. In both cases, Life always wants to exceed itself.

The difference between strong and weak is always a comparison of weakness.
all value judgments are comparisons rooted in a weakness....take intelligence or knowledge...we consider different levels of awareness or knowledge not absolutes.
Plato's "ideas" were ridiculous. There is no perfect, ideal, chair, existing in some netherworld, upon which all corporeal, real, chairs are compared.

Lyssa wrote:

Your starting point is one kind of exhaustion, and mine is the other; because, I say this poetically - the very fact that there is Life hints at the excess instinct in death/disorder which wants to exceed itself [not as aim or purpose though].

And the fact that life is so rare and so tenuous proves that htis excess is temporary or regional, not a cosmic normality but a rarity, an exception, produced by the turmoil of (inter)activity.

Lyssa wrote:

Life is a degree of becoming of death/disorder. The joy of being-in-becoming is more primal than the pain of preserving itself. Life is an overflowing - for me.

Now you are talking about something else....joy.This is an emotional reaction to a phenomenon or a sensation.
The "joy of becoming" is found in its constant victory over death. It, in that moment of excessive power - because a suffering life does not feel any such joy - expreinces this ephemeral victory, knowing that it will not last.
Would not a pretty girl feel joy amongst the ugly, even though she knows that her beauty is fleeting?
Would not an intelligent man feel this joy amongst the brutish, knowing that this state is doomed?

Would not both try to continue or cheat death, by replicating themselves, or their minds?
Would they not want to reproduce, despite the risks and costs?

Satyr> No doubt the start of life must have been a product of a regional excess in energies, but that life is so rare suggests that this is, and is becoming increasingly so, an exception to the rule.

I agree with this. And I want to quote a beautiful N. passage to pre-prevent myself! from slipping into a sloppy thinking as I tend to think poetically;

"Let us beware! —Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me.
Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a "machine" does it far too much honor.
Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.
Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase "unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic and reproachful.
But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either.
Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has meaning. Let us beware of saying death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.—Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances: matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" [Joyful Wisdom, 109]


Satyr> To die is easy, to resist dying, which is what living is,

Living is "not just" to resist dying but to assert its self more powerfully - some manage this, some do not.
The drive of life is to grow; and it resists dying by constantly dying to itself, in becoming it always dies to/sheds its previous state. Life always lives at the expense of other life; so where there is life, there is always some dying.
"- The world has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away.
- It maintains itself in both. It lives on itself: its excrements are its food." [WTP, 1066]

Satyr> And so this linear dynamic towards fragmentation, increasing entropy, appears or is interpreted by the weak, because we are all weakl to varying degrees, as a greater power. this can then be imagined as a God or as an absolute which promises finality: the merger of the weak with its imagined, projected, hoped for, absolute, omnipotent, perfection.
This is why the masculine spirit is a spirit of battling agaisnt a greater foe. The spirit of resisting despite the incoming loss; nobility.
To live, for a short time, as a man, as a being yet to be, destined never to be, proud to be in perpetual Becoming.
Is this not your Nietzsche's overman?
The hero who laughs at his own condition.

Sure; I understand and even acknowledge that interpretation. But midnight can be seen as the end of one day or the start of another day. Weakness/exhaustion can be interpreted as a terminal end point or pt. of commencement, a day about to be discharged... I choose to take this as my starting point, and by doing so, I am not being "optimistic".

"From the pressure of plentitude, from the tension of forces that continually increase in us and do not yet know how to discharge themselves, there arises a condition like that preceding a storm: the nature we constitute becomes dark. This, too, is "pessimism" - ... a revaluation of values by virtue of which the accumulated forces are shown a way, a whither, so they explode into lightning flashes and deeds - certainly does not need to be a doctrine of happiness: by releasing force that had been compressed and dammed to the point of torment it brings happiness." [WTP, 1022]

"Let us dwell a moment on this symptom of higher culture - I call it the pessimism of strength. Man no longer needs "justification of ills"; "justification" is precisely what he abhors: he finds senseless ills the most interesting. If he formerly had need of a god, he now takes delight in a world disorder without God, a world of chance, to whose essence belong the terrible, the ambiguous, the seductive. ...
Our pessimism: the world does not have the value we thought it had. ...That is precisely how we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values. In sum: the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naivete of our ideals, and while we thought that we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value." [WTP, 1019, 32]

The Overman would be such a pessimist. In identifying himself with the total character of life [both order and entropy, both as resister and overcoming all resistances, both as being-in-becoming and the becoming-of-all-being], he would affirm himself as the one who necessarily returns and is returned eternally just as Life in the ceaseless passing away has not yet begun to become. Since becoming does not "aim" to be something, the Overman would affirm the world without a goal, this senselessness of this process itself as a goal, his Dionysian strength of pessimism would require no justification for this eternal agony-comedy.

Satyr> Despite this resistance entropy continues to increase putting more burdens or those that live. A counter-reaction from the living is to bond and bind into greater organisms, with more energies at their disposal and with the benefits of synergy at hand.

Yes.


Lyssa wrote:
Its not concerned primarily with preserving itself.
Satyr> This is laughable.
If it is not, as you say concerned with preserving self, then it loses all concern, it loses all possibility, it loses self.
In order to even hope and think and project the organism must first take care with preserving itself. It is nothing without this first concern; this is why a life is always selfish. It is full of self, before it can even have to option of sacrificing self.

That is why I said, it is not concerned "primarily" with self-preservation; this is only secondary. Every ego wants to encroach upon the other. The strong do this and the weak because they cannot, they co operate to form a stronger unit and then seize. Nothing is content and concerned with just being and clinging to itself. Everything wants to self-assert, not self-preserve.

Satyr> The difference between strong and weak is always a comparison of weakness.
all value judgments are comparisons rooted in a weakness....take intelligence or knowledge...we consider different levels of awareness or knowledge not absolutes.
Plato's "ideas" were ridiculous. There is no perfect, ideal, chair, existing in some netherworld, upon which all corporeal, real, chairs are compared.

You can say it like that too.
In terms of a comparison of strength, we can say, the strong is that which is not yet checked, it has a greater inheritance of force, and the weak is checked.

Lyssa wrote:
Your starting point is one kind of exhaustion, and mine is the other; because, I say this poetically - the very fact that there is Life hints at the excess instinct in death/disorder which wants to exceed itself [not as aim or purpose though].
Satyr> And the fact that life is so rare and so tenuous proves that htis excess is temporary or regional, not a cosmic normality but a rarity, an exception, produced by the turmoil of (inter)activity.

Yes; life is rare.
Yes; this excess may be temporary.
Yes; disorder is the norm.
And I'm saying wherever there is life, it will characterize itself by its exceeding itself into a still higher life or into death/disorder, and death/disorder due to some internal necessity or (ill)logic of its own exceeds itself and differentiates itself into life.


Lyssa wrote:
Life is a degree of becoming of death/disorder. The joy of being-in-becoming is more primal than the pain of preserving itself. Life is an overflowing - for me.
Satyr> Now you are talking about something else....joy.This is an emotional reaction to a phenomenon or a sensation.
The "joy of becoming" is found in its constant victory over death. It, in that moment of excessive power - because a suffering life does not feel any such joy - expreinces this ephemeral victory, knowing that it will not last.

No, no, I don't mean it like an emotional reaction. Instead of joy, you could call this the "harmonie" of Heraclitus.

The Overman with the Dionysian heart, or the heart of Nothingness would simultaneously affirm the maximal dissonance of life as order and life as entropy; such a torment would almost be a state of self-joy.

"D.51 - They do not comprehend how a thing Agrees at Variance with itself: an attunement (or fitting together, harmonie) turning back , like that of the bow and the lyre." [Heraclitus]

"In contrast to the animals, man has cultivated an abundance of contrary drives and impulses within himself... The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. ...where the plant "man" shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully, but are controlled." [WTP, 966]

"The term for opposition, diapheromenon, has an etymological sense of 'moving apart', 'diverging', hence 'differing'... The principle of agreement-in-conflict is expressed in neuter form, as in D.10: sympheromenon diaphermenon 'it moves together and it moves apart' (convergent divergent) and synaidon diaidon 'it sings together and it sings apart' (consonant disonant).
The concept of harmonie as a unity composed of conflicting parts is thus the model for an understanding of the world ordering as a unified whole. And it is the comprehension of this pattern in all its applications that constitutes wisdom. For it is this structure that is common (xynon) to all things. And this pattern, or its recognition, is what Heraclitus designates as gnome, the plan or intention by which all things are streered through all (D.41).
D.54: The hidden attunement (harmonie) is better/desirable (kreitton) than the obvious one." [The art and thought of Heraclitus, Charles Kahn]

The Overman's amor fati is the fitting together of every and any fate that befalls one, and one even welcomes what has not befallen one. Heraclitus speaks of this self-assertion, when he says,

D.84A: "It rests/abides by changing."

Not only would the Overman desire this hidden harmonie, but he would be this harmonie personified. When Heraclitus writes D.48: "The name of the bow[bios] is life[bios]; its work is death." , he meant this harmonie/'joy' is more primal than the pain of the clinging/preserving self.

If the world is meaningless, how much of this meaninglessness can one endure without resorting to opposites or some God or absolute states... the Dionysian becomes a question of a pessimistic strength and the excess it takes to endure howmuch ever meaninglessness.
I understand your Apollonian position though. The Apollonian is a defensive position, it is severe and calm and keeps things at a distance and is clean and clear, safeguards its boundaries and boldly holds its stand; the Dionysian is an aggressive, assimilating, transgressive position that upsets all boundaries and walks into the other's territory without being afraid to get its hands dirty. A. and D. are interactive phenomena, now this and now the other, and it depends on which aspect predominates the most for whom in their perspective. To me, the Dionysian is as masculine as the Apollonian.

Lyssa wrote:

Living is "not just" to resist dying but to assert its self more powerfully - some manage this, some do not.
The drive of life is to grow; and it resists dying by constantly dying to itself, in becoming it always dies to/sheds its previous state. Life always lives at the expense of other life; so where there is life, there is always some dying.
"- The world has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away.
- It maintains itself in both. It lives on itself: its excrements are its food." [WTP, 1066]

This is only the life that succeeds.

This "will's" more implies a will before one emerges.
For me a will is a focus of energies upon an object/objective and so it comes about once self-maintenance has succeeded in producing excesses.
Of course growth might be considered the result of healing the consequences of attrition, (inter)activity, upon the emergent unity, and like when a bone is broken it heals bigger, stronger than it was.

There is no willing before there is a life to will.

Lyssa wrote:

Sure; I understand and even acknowledge that interpretation. But midnight can be seen as the end of one day or the start of another day. Weakness/exhaustion can be interpreted as a terminal end point or pt. of commencement, a day about to be discharged... I choose to take this as my starting point, and by doing so, I am not being "optimistic".

But you are being optimistic.

In my essay [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] I give an overview of my positions.
In short, you focus on the light instead of the dark. All around you, and inside you, there is need, absence, imperfection, and you choose to see the perfection.
It's because the mind is addicted and reliant upon what it lacks and so it seeks it out and produces it as projection.

[quote="Lyssa"]"From the pressure of plentitude, from the tension of forces that continually increase in us and do not yet know how to discharge themselves, there arises a condition like that preceding a storm: the nature we constitute becomes dark. This, too, is "pessimism" - ... a revaluation of values by virtue of which the accumulated forces are shown a way, a whither, so they explode into lightning flashes and deeds - certainly does not need to be a doctrine of happiness: by releasing force that had been compressed and dammed to the point of torment it brings happiness." [WTP, 1022]And this pressure, like tha tof the libidinal energies, is a result of need. It is mortality that makes libidinal energy possible.
Death forces the living to store and to care and to prepare and to accumulate, then discharging energies because they are unable to store any more, because they are overflowing.
This point is different for each.

Lyssa wrote:

The Overman would be such a pessimist. In identifying himself with the total character of life [both order and entropy, both as resister and overcoming all resistances, both as being-in-becoming and the becoming-of-all-being], he would affirm himself as the one who necessarily returns and is returned eternally just as Life in the ceaseless passing away has not yet begun to become. Since becoming does not "aim" to be something, the Overman would affirm the world without a goal, this senselessness of this process itself as a goal, his Dionysian strength of pessimism would require no justification for this eternal agony-comedy.

The Overman is the one who has overcome his resentment of himself, of his own nature, his own temporal essence. It is an acceptance and a recognition that temporality makes him possible and though death is inevitable it is necessary to make life possible..and that though evil is destructive it is essential to bring about good.

This is the anti-Christian position. the Overman has overcome his self-hatred and self-pity, usually projected as pity and hatred of otherness.
But did Nietzsche do so?

Lyssa wrote:

That is why I said, it is not concerned "primarily" with self-preservation; this is only secondary. Every ego wants to encroach upon the other. The strong do this and the weak because they cannot, they co operate to form a stronger unit and then seize. Nothing is content and concerned with just being and clinging to itself. Everything wants to self-assert, not self-preserve.

Why this "just"...you sound embittered by the prospect of simply existing.
The organism is brought about as a (re)action to entropy and so of course it is always striving towards more order, as resisting entropy is its nature and so increasing order is its only function.

But throw a rock in a river....it sits there seemingly unmoving, but it is in constant turmoil as it resits the current and it is being chipped away by the water. It is active, though you would call ti static.
Would this rock want to increase its resistance force if it could? Yes....it is a weakness wanting to become stronger...but never attaining omnipotence.
Nor should it, as this would mean its need.

Lyssa wrote:

You can say it like that too.
In terms of a comparison of strength, we can say, the strong is that which is not yet checked, it has a greater inheritance of force, and the weak is checked.

No either/or here. There is only degree, no absolute.
There is only relating, no Being.
When you accept entropy as a basis all is in relation to this tendency. Life, therefore, can only be honestly thought of as a degree of dying, or in relation to dying, not of immortality.

Lyssa wrote:

Yes; life is rare.
Yes; this excess may be temporary.
Yes; disorder is the norm.
And I'm saying wherever there is life, it will characterize itself by its exceeding itself into a still higher life or into death/disorder, and death/disorder due to some internal necessity or (ill)logic of its own exceeds itself and differentiates itself into life.

You remind me of Christians who claim that Evolution is wrong because apes are not, seemingly, evolving.

The life you see around you is the one that proved itself fit.
Can you imagine how many forms, mutations, come about and quickly perish, never resulting in any excess?
Fitness, is this ability to produce excess...is it not? But this is not the rule, but the exception.

Lyssa wrote:

No, no, I don't mean it like an emotional reaction. Instead of joy, you could call this the "harmonie" of Heraclitus.

Human mnids build mental models trying to make them cohesive and internally harmonious. this is how sueprorganisms alkso work when they try to manufacture the erfect system.
Harmony is the desirable....it is then projected as real when it is a simplification/generalization in the mind.
The exception to this rule is described in what I call compartmentalization and Orwell calls wordspeak.

Lyssa wrote:

The Overman with the Dionysian heart, or the heart of Nothingness would simultaneously affirm the maximal dissonance of life as order and life as entropy; such a torment would almost be a state of self-joy.

A drunken madman's joy laughing at his own incumbent demise.
Have you never been in a situation where things went so tragically wrong that you had to giggle and shake your head?

How anal, in comparison, does not Apollo seem?
Dionysus can laugh at the world and himself. He is the masculine Apollo coming to terms with his femininity, his wordliness, his corporeal nature.
If masculine is order then here too man is only so in degrees, whereas the feminine always wins out.The earth buries the man and from it a new man emerges to try again.
For a tea-toddler you should love the drunken master.

Lyssa wrote:

"D.51 - They do not comprehend how a thing Agrees at Variance with itself: an attunement (or fitting together, harmonie) turning back , like that of the bow and the lyre." [Heraclitus]

Yes, because the organism is in constant Flux; constantly repairing the attrition of temporality, of (inter)activity.
It is being remade continually, guided by a formula, a genetic code.

The bow and Lyre eventually decay...there is no absolute balance. They do not exist in a vacuum.

Satyr> This "will's" more implies a will before one emerges.
For me a will is a focus of energies upon an object/objective and so it comes about once self-maintenance has succeeded in producing excesses.
There is no willing before there is a life to will.

Self-maintenance is only a by-product of the life's originary drive to grow. It is because an entity wants to grow and exceed, it thrusts out appropriating new material in its way or co operates with other wills that helps maintain itself. The goal is not self-maintenance, but flourishing and becoming more and more powerful. Life Is willing or treaties of wills acting and interacting.

Satyr> But you are being optimistic.
In short, you focus on the light instead of the dark.

If I start at midnight as the day that is to break knowing full well it will be midnight again ad. inf. in vain, if You want to call this optimistic, so be it.
It takes the courage of a lion and the heart of an aion-child to focus on building a sand-castle by the side of constantly annihilating tidal waves.

Satyr> And this pressure, like tha tof the libidinal energies, is a result of need. It is mortality that makes libidinal energy possible.
Death forces the living to store and to care and to prepare and to accumulate, then discharging energies because they are unable to store any more, because they are overflowing.
This point is different for each.

The point was starting with a great accumulation of force need not be a condition of happiness or an optimistic happy picture in itself. High point of mid-noon can symbolize a day's optimism or the pessimism, of such noons that again and again from their own pressure have to down-go into many nights. This will to destroy as creators without sulking, ressentiment, exhaustion - this self-joy of an excess spirit is also one kind of pessimism, a Dionysian pessimism. N. said his Dionysian formula for happiness was "Yes, No, A straight Line, and a Goal" - "happiness" is not some pleasant consoled/consolable relaxed optimism, but to me, it means a relentless, unyielding, untiring, self-focussed, aggressive attitude.

Satyr> This is the anti-Christian position. the Overman has overcome his self-hatred and self-pity, usually projected as pity and hatred of otherness.
But did Nietzsche do so?

What makes you doubt?
And if I say yes or no, what real relevance does it have? Everything speaks to everybody in its own way.

Satyr> Why this "just"...you sound embittered by the prospect of simply existing.

This is not about my emotions; for eg., Xt. is the life's will to anti-life because it resists sacrifice and becoming and so inflates the value of an individual to such an extreme that he becomes insacrificeable... it tends to self-preservation. Hence N. calls it the "anti-life instinct par excellence". But ultimately, even here Xt. was not content with just preserving and dying, it did/does everything to postpone its death. Life and the drive to flourish speaks even in such an anti-life movt. like Xt.

Satyr> But throw a rock in a river....it sits there seemingly unmoving, but it is in constant turmoil as it resits the current and it is being chipped away by the water. It is active, though you would call ti static.

No, I wouldn't call it static. Resisting, self-restraint is an Active state; reacting and giving in is passivity.

Satyr> Would this rock want to increase its resistance force if it could? Yes

That is what I'm also saying. The rock wants to increase its resistance force and not just simply be.

Satyr> No either/or here. There is only degree, no absolute.
There is only relating, no Being.

I didn't say anything diff.

Satyr> When you accept entropy as a basis all is in relation to this tendency. Life, therefore, can only be honestly thought of as a degree of dying, or in relation to dying, not of immortality.

And accepting entropy as the basis, I will say, Life is as strong as it is not checked by something stronger, and differs from other life and entropy as a degree of this strength. You can define it in terms of weakness too.

And I'm saying wherever there is life, it will characterize itself by its exceeding itself into a still higher life or into death/disorder, and death/disorder due to some internal necessity or (ill)logic of its own exceeds itself and differentiates itself into life.
Satyr> You remind me of Christians who claim that Evolution is wrong because apes are not, seemingly, evolving.
The life you see around you is the one that proved itself fit.
Can you imagine how many forms, mutations, come about and quickly perish, never resulting in any excess?
Fitness, is this ability to produce excess...is it not? But this is not the rule, but the exception.

Now you are putting words like fitness in my mouth, after I've explicitly affirmed Yes Life is rare and an exception and entropy is the norm. Many things and mutations have perished indeed. I'm saying transformation and becoming is the total character of life+entropy, of the world as a whole. Poetically speaking, it is as if even Death was not content with just Being, it Became... life. Everything transforms.There is only Being-in-Becoming, or put another way poetically, by Be-ing, the self-assertive Being has atleast temporarily exceeded Becoming.

Satyr> Harmony is the desirable....it is then projected as real when it is a simplification/generalization in the mind.
The exception to this rule is described in what I call compartmentalization and Orwell calls wordspeak.

True, Heraclitus cannot be read literally.

Lyssa wrote:
The Overman with the Dionysian heart, or the heart of Nothingness would simultaneously affirm the maximal dissonance of life as order and life as entropy; such a torment would almost be a state of self-joy.
Satyr> A drunken madman's joy laughing at his own incumbent demise.
Have you never been in a situation where things went so tragically wrong that you had to giggle and shake your head?

There is a diff. bet. laughing off the world, laughing back at the world, laughing along with the world... the Overman is a tightrope walker, a balancer, knowing there is a time for each and many other kinds of laughter, some to re-discover, and some to invent along as he goes. There is something really beautiful about this kind of solitude.

Satyr> How anal, in comparison, does not Apollo seem?

Not at all. Today's world, and our present time and epoch, need an Apollo more than the Dionysian. It needs severe individualism of selective separation and opening a wide gulf of distance between itself and the times and the times to come.
We need Sharper Boundaries that deny entry to all, that make them halt, allowing only those capable of tedious discipline and clarity themselves the privilege of a view from the mountain heights... what good is Dionysos if Apollo cannot defend and safeguard what Dionysos has gathered across boundaries... I do not deny the heroism or necessity of the Apollonian.

Satyr> Dionysus can laugh at the world and himself. He is the masculine Apollo coming to terms with his femininity, his wordliness, his corporeal nature.
If masculine is order then here too man is only so in degrees, whereas the feminine always wins out.The earth buries the man and from it a new man emerges to try again.

There is more than one Dionysian. N.'s Dionysian was prob. even more masculine that I've managed to grasp so far. N. himself would prob. laugh at my Dionysian ideal. It doesn't matter, to each his/her own.

Satyr> For a tea-toddler you should love the drunken master.

For some refined and hypersensitive Dionysian spirits, spring is already an overwhelming intoxication.

Satyr> The bow and Lyre eventually decay...there is no absolute balance. They do not exist in a vacuum.

I didn't say there was. The point was to explain harmonie in terms of incorporating max. dissonance possible; max. tautness of the bow, max. melody of the lyre, max. contradictions balanced in the heart of the Dionysian, and this state is more primal;
"Joy does not want heirs, it does not want children; joy wants itself, it wants eternity, it wants recurrence, it wants everything eternally like itself; everything that suffers says - I want children, I do not want myself, I want heirs.
Said ye ever Yea to one joy? - Then said ye Yea also unto all woe; all things are enlinked; enlaced and enamoured. Wanted ye ever once to come twice - then wanted ye all to come back again! - all anew, all eternal, all enlinked, enlaced and enamoured - oh then did ye love the world. Joy wants itself, it bites into itself, the ring's will writhes in it. So rich is joy that it thirsts for woe, for hell, for hate, for shame, for the lame, for the world - for this world. For joys all want themselves, therefore do they also want grief." [TSZ]

Lyssa wrote:

Self-maintenance is only a by-product of the life's originary drive to grow.

Here you are placing a trait of life as preexisting its emergence...this is religion and has no foundation on anything experienced.
A life cannot will itself into being.

Lyssa wrote:

It is because an entity wants to grow and exceed, it thrusts out appropriating new material in its way or co operates with other wills that helps maintain itself. The goal is not self-maintenance, but flourishing and becoming more and more powerful. Life Is willing or treaties of wills acting and interacting.

Life wants nothing, in its primitive form....it simply feels lack, a needs. It is later when life developes self-cosnciuosness that it can turn on tiself and categorize these feelings, sensations.

Lyssa wrote:

If I start at midnight as the day that is to break knowing full well it will be midnight again ad. inf. in vain, if You want to call this optimistic, so be it.
It takes the courage of a lion and the heart of an aion-child to focus on building a sand-castle by the side of constantly annihilating tidal waves.

Yes, a child is always naive in this regard.
But is not courage to fight despite knowing that you will lose in the end?
To be brave and ignorant is easy.

Lyssa wrote:

The point was starting with a great accumulation of force need not be a condition of happiness or an optimistic happy picture in itself. High point of mid-noon can symbolize a day's optimism or the pessimism, of such noons that again and again from their own pressure have to down-go into many nights. This will to destroy as creators without sulking, ressentiment, exhaustion - this self-joy of an excess spirit is also one kind of pessimism, a Dionysian pessimism. N. said his Dionysian formula for happiness was "Yes, No, A straight Line, and a Goal" - "happiness" is not some pleasant consoled/consolable relaxed optimism, but to me, it means a relentless, unyielding, untiring, self-focussed, aggressive attitude.

Yes, and so one is happy/content when the energies at his disposal exceed the requirement of his self-maintenance...and since this is never a permanent condition happiness is fleeting.
Contentment is a result of strength.

Lyssa wrote:

What makes you doubt?
And if I say yes or no, what real relevance does it have? Everything speaks to everybody in its own way.

I doubt everything.
But, if so, then a christian believing in the coming Rapture should not concern me either. why does he/
Because I am forced to consider his effect in my environment as I am affected and reliant upon my environment.

Lyssa wrote:

No, I wouldn't call it static. Resisting, self-restraint is an Active state; reacting and giving in is passivity.

Existing is to be active. There is no static state and passivity is simply submitting to the superior Will of another. A rock does no such thing....it simply (inter)acts following the path-of-least-resistance.

We might think of a plant resisting entropy....it leaves an observable product of this resistance in the form of a stem. It is a still living, (inter)acting crystallization of its ongoing resistance: its past in full view.
We might say that the plant does not grow at all, but leaves a trail of its resistance behind it, as the tides of change wash over it. But, as it seemingly resists succesfully, it also falls behind, it's energies failing with each spurt towards order...as disorder is increasing despite its efforts.

A future universe would not accommodate a life as weak as ours....this is why all life combines, seeking a more powerful resistance to increasing entropy.

Lyssa wrote:

That is what I'm also saying. The rock wants to increase its resistance force and not just simply be.

How can a rock will anything when it is not alive, not cosnciuos?
Ergo only life can Will and not stones or dust.
Therefore Will to...anything is a construct of the mind seeking direction and a finality, a goal, a reason, a meaning a purpose.

Lyssa wrote:

Now you are putting words like fitness in my mouth, after I've explicitly affirmed Yes Life is rare and an exception and entropy is the norm.

Therefore your earlier "positivity" was in error.
Life is doomed to failure, and this is why it replicates itself, renewing its hope. This is what makes it divine.

Lyssa wrote:

Many things and mutations have perished indeed. I'm saying transformation and becoming is the total character of life+entropy, of the world as a whole. Poetically speaking, it is as if even Death was not content with just Being, it Became... life. Everything transforms.There is only Being-in-Becoming, or put another way poetically, by Be-ing, the self-assertive Being has atleast temporarily exceeded Becoming.

I cannot ascribe to inanimate matter a will which then result in life.
This is a shrouded God metaphor.
I cannot say how life was produced but I do know that in the constant (inter)action all possibilities transpire. One such anti-death possibility found the right circumstances to come about, as with every action an equal and opposite reaction is made possible.

Lyssa wrote:

True, Heraclitus cannot be read literally.

And, in fact, nothing can be read literally, as all is metaphorical, art.

The absence of an absolute makes the mind its creator....and so it is a symbol of what is nowhere in evidence; a static abstraction symbolizing a fluid process.
Like the metaphor of a "river". It must be contained within boundaries, such as shores, to be made comprehensible, but there are no boundaries in reality.
A boundary is an ambiguous point in space/time where a differentiation in rate of flow is perceived.

Lyssa wrote:

There is a diff. bet. laughing off the world, laughing back at the world, laughing along with the world... the Overman is a tightrope walker, a balancer, knowing there is a time for each and many other kinds of laughter, some to re-discover, and some to invent along as he goes. There is something really beautiful about this kind of solitude.

I see the full spectrum of Nietzschean metaphor in you.

Lyssa wrote:

Not at all. Today's world, and our present time and epoch, need an Apollo more than the Dionysian. It needs severe individualism of selective separation and opening a wide gulf of distance between itself and the times and the times to come.

Very good....and you are speaking to a distinctly Appolonian mind as I require Dionysian nectar to indulge in that side of my essence.

Lyssa wrote:

We need Sharper Boundaries that deny entry to all, that make them halt, allowing only those capable of tedious discipline and clarity themselves the privilege of a view from the mountain heights... what good is Dionysos if Apollo cannot defend and safeguard what Dionysos has gathered across boundaries... I do not deny the heroism or necessity of the Apollonian.

And that's why I try to be unforgiving, strict and categorical.
I set-up boundaries to define myself and those of my kind.

Lyssa wrote:

For some refined and hypersensitive Dionysian spirits, spring is already an overwhelming intoxication.

And how sweet it is.

I didn't say there was. The point was to explain harmonie in terms of incorporating max. dissonance possible; max. tautness of the bow, max. melody of the lyre, max. contradictions balanced in the heart of the Dionysian, and this state is more primal;
[/quote]The embracing of need/suffering is this "Yea" to existing, as all existing is experienced as need/suffering.

When I feel need, I feel a yearning for what I lack, a Self; to complete by Becoming and to Be.

Lyssa wrote:
Self-maintenance is only a by-product of the life's originary drive to grow.
Satyr> Here you are placing a trait of life as preexisting its emergence.

No, this is simply the life process as we observe it everyday. Where there is life, there is growth and there's decay.

If I start at midnight as the day that is to break knowing full well it will be midnight again ad. inf. in vain, if You want to call this optimistic, so be it.
It takes the courage of a lion and the heart of an aion-child to focus on building a sand-castle by the side of constantly annihilating tidal waves.
Satyr> Yes, a child is always naive in this regard.
But is not courage to fight despite knowing that you will lose in the end?
To be brave and ignorant is easy.

I mean the child as the specific metaphor used by Zarathustra in the three Metamorphoses. The zeal of a child is untiring and your second remark is exactly what I mean. Knowing that he will lose anyways, the Hero still welcomes the second day of battle. One of my fav. lines,
"I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto..." [WTP, 382]
One needs courage, and, this kind of malicious, wicked delight and zeal of a child. I will call this a Sanguine Pessimism - thanks for inspiring me to a new phrase.

Satyr> Yes, and so one is happy/content when the energies at his disposal exceed the requirement of his self-maintenance...

This is what N. was clarifying: to the pessimist of strength, excess energies at his disposal are almost painful that expending/not-maintaining himself, conducting himself away like lightning brings happiness... the overflowing is like a self-destructive energy. Happiness is not the outcome of self-maintenance. It takes strength like the midnoon to stand at that point and not look at itself as the height of the day but look at itself as a down-going into the night and again and again if it has to. The optimist would see the midnoon as the day's height; the pessimist as its nearing twilight, and he goes one step further and welcomes this downgoing.

Satyr> and since this is never a permanent condition happiness is fleeting.
Contentment is a result of strength.

The Dionysian is not corncerned with contentment, but wishes upon itself max. terribleness and uncertainties and questionableness and all kinds of abysses possible; it takes this upon itself even to the point of self-destruction... it feels itself as an excess that will keep on returning, keep on turning up. It is concerned with max. expansion, max. assimilation, max. binding and the urge to a unity, to have in one heart max. chaos that it can possibly balance; it is a dancing star...
"A being darkly wise and rudely great..." [A. Pope]

Satyr> I doubt everything.
But, if so, then a christian believing in the coming Rapture should not concern me either. why does he/
Because I am forced to consider his effect in my environment as I am affected and reliant upon my environment.

I am saying if the Xt. believes in the coming Rapture, are you going to believe it because that Xt. said so? I'm saying go with your own mind and heart as to what N. thought.

Satyr> A future universe would not accommodate a life as weak as ours....this is why all life combines, seeking a more powerful resistance to increasing entropy.

Yes.

Satyr> is what I'm also saying. The rock wants to increase its resistance force and not just simply be.
How can a rock will anything when it is not alive, not cosnciuos?

I was going with your own example of the rock.
The tempo of life of the inorganic world cannot be perceived by our minds; diff. rates of becoming.

Satyr> Therefore Will to...anything is a construct of the mind seeking direction and a finality, a goal, a reason, a meaning a purpose.

Will-to-something is an interpretational will-to-power of life, yes.

Lyssa wrote:
Now you are putting words like fitness in my mouth, after I've explicitly affirmed Yes Life is rare and an exception and entropy is the norm.
Satyr> Therefore your earlier "positivity" was in error.
Life is doomed to failure, and this is why it replicates itself, renewing its hope. This is what makes it divine.

I expressed no positivity. And I 100% understand what you are saying.
We can speak of life being doomed to failure or such only if we can speak of it having some inherent aim to be something. Since it doesn't, and life is basically meaningless, we can evaluate it only by terms or degrees of power. Life has greatest value wherever there has been the greatest effect of force, the greatest overflowing... and so I take this as my starting point. I see things in degrees of strength. If life is doomed to fail - then I'll see it in terms of endurance, in terms of strength of how much it can resist, strength of how much entropy it can welcome and digest and wishes upon itself, etc. etc. This is not positivity, this is a measure of self-joy, of "aggressiveness".

Satyr> I cannot ascribe to inanimate matter a will which then result in life.
This is a shrouded God metaphor.
I cannot say how life was produced but I do know that in the constant (inter)action all possibilities transpire. One such anti-death possibility found the right circumstances to come about, as with every action an equal and opposite reaction is made possible.

I agree with you, and you put it better than me. So this 'turn' from death to anti-death is what I say death has overflowed into anti-death. A rarity that is overflowing.

Satyr> And, in fact, nothing can be read literally, as all is metaphorical, art.

Yes.

Satyr> Very good....and you are speaking to a distinctly Appolonian mind as I require Dionysian nectar to indulge in that side of my essence.

Understand.
Zen of Drinking Alone: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Satyr> And that's why I try to be unforgiving, strict and categorical.
I set-up boundaries to define myself and those of my kind.

And you have my respect, encouragement, and praise for it.

Lyssa wrote:
For some refined and hypersensitive Dionysian spirits, spring is already an overwhelming intoxication.
Satyr>And how sweet it is.

Merriness of Mars' Martian Madness Marching with the Muses in March... how vernal everything is...

Satyr> The embracing of need/suffering is this "Yea" to existing, as all existing is experienced as need/suffering.

To say Yea and embrace need/suffering needs an excess spirit; the Yea overflows from self-joy.

Satyr> When I feel need, I feel a yearning for what I lack, a Self; to complete by Becoming and to Be.

Ok.

Lyssa wrote:

Lyssa wrote:No, this is simply the life process as we observe it everyday. Where there is life, there is growth and there's decay.

Yes, and decay is the norm, it is entropy, whereas growth is a resistance, (re)action to it.
To the norm, which occurs with no effort (negative) it is life,a s affirming itself, which is the out of the ordinary (positive).

Lyssa wrote:

I mean the child as the specific metaphor used by Zarathustra in the three Metamorphoses. The zeal of a child is untiring and your second remark is exactly what I mean. Knowing that he will lose anyways, the Hero still welcomes the second day of battle. One of my fav. lines,
"I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto..." [WTP, 382]
One needs courage, and, this kind of malicious, wicked delight and zeal of a child. I will call this a Sanguine Pessimism - thanks for inspiring me to a new phrase.

And since organic life, precedes consciousness, and consciousness precedes self-consciousness, this "courage" or this "child-like" state is not th same as infancy. It is a alter development and a result of coming to terms with existence, which is, in regards to life, negative; yet, this negativity, makes life,a s a rejection of it, possible.

Lyssa wrote:

This is what N. was clarifying: to the pessimist of strength, excess energies at his disposal are almost painful that expending/not-maintaining himself, conducting himself away like lightning brings happiness... the overflowing is like a self-destructive energy.

Then, "overflow" is only possible with life, and it is not a universal characteristic that predates the emergence of life.

Lyssa wrote:

Happiness is not the outcome of self-maintenance.

No it isn't; hapiness, contentment, comfort, is the excess left-over once self-maintenance has been taken care of. It is a symptom of power. Since power is a measurement of weakness then happiness is fleeting and temporary and always.
A strong man lifts 100 lbs. with ease and can hold it comfortably...a weaker man feels stressed by its mass.
The strong man feels content, at ease, happy, but as he holds it the stress begins to build and build, as he is weakening and fatiguing as time goes on.
He feeds, trying to maintain his strength but this is a losing cause and only able to produce ephemeral effects.
Knowing this he cherishes the moment; he rejoices for the ability, no matter how fleeting it might be; he enjoys the sensation.

Lyssa wrote:

The Dionysian is not corncerned with contentment, but wishes upon itself max. terribleness and uncertainties and questionableness and all kinds of abysses possible; it takes this upon itself even to the point of self-destruction... it feels itself as an excess that will keep on returning, keep on turning up.

Can't relate.
Every rebirth is a new experience.
Unless you wish to claim that information is retained after each recurrence, I see no point in even bringing it up.
If you claim a universal consciousness, a God, then I still can't relate.

Lyssa wrote:

It is concerned with max. expansion, max. assimilation, max. binding and the urge to a unity, to have in one heart max. chaos that it can possibly balance; it is a dancing star...
"A being darkly wise and rudely great..." [A. Pope]

The only reason to seek suffering is as a means to increase pleasure, or increase your level of toelranbce for suffering, so as to multiply the possibility for being content for longer periods of time.
The rest about recurrence is bullshit. Who cares if I am reborn and I relive the exact same life if every time I can only and msut only exprience it in exactly the same way?

Lyssa wrote:

I am saying if the Xt. believes in the coming Rapture, are you going to believe it because that Xt. said so? I'm saying go with your own mind and heart as to what N. thought.

Who, the fuck, cares what Nietzsche thought, except as a reference point, a second-hand account?
Who is he the new messiah? Jesus for the modernistic mind?
You are repalcing one authority with another, only claimnig the superiority of the one you surrender to.
You are talking like Sauwelios. At least you are female, making it less insulting.

My goal is to dedicate my life to understanding how Nietzsche experienced this existence....fuck him!!!
Who, the hell, are you talking to? Some woman?!!!A fag?!!!
The only objection you have is that my "dedication" should be in deciphering Nietzsche and not Jesus?
My interest in reality....the world. Not a man's insights.

Lyssa wrote:

I was going with your own example of the rock.
The tempo of life of the inorganic world cannot be perceived by our minds; diff. rates of becoming.

nd you should consider "Becoming" not as a movement away form decaying, but as a resistance to it.
There is no ideal which is ever achieved, one simply tries to contain the damage being dealt.
The ideal is a projection of a desirable goal; it is a direction which defines the quality of your resistance and its power, perhaps.
Will to Life does not lead to immortality. It simply embraces life to such a degree that it prolongs it or makes it more enjoyable, or increases its possibilities.
Will to Power does not result in Godliness, in omnipotence, as weakness is what life is....we are all dying and too weak to do anything about it.

He simply replaces one term for another, signifying the same thing, the same absence, but evoking a more heroic attitude; a different way of experiencing the same process.

Lyssa wrote:

Will-to-something is an interpretational will-to-power of life, yes.

indeed...in fact all words denoting an absolute state are actually trying to describe the same absence but only projecting it with slight variations.
Will to God is another good one. Will towards God, to seek out the divine, the absolute, is the same thing as Will to Power.

Lyssa wrote:

I expressed no positivity. And I 100% understand what you are saying.
We can speak of life being doomed to failure or such only if we can speak of it having some inherent aim to be something.

The "aim" is totally a human construct; it is the "towards" part of the Will to Whatever formula.
This towards defines you as a person, as a personality as a self; it identifies you. What it points to is absent, and it is you who must decide what it is.

This is why a child-like Dionysian joy must be found; a laughter of knowing the tragedy of it all.
Dionysus laughs at Apollo, but also admires and honors Him.

Lyssa wrote:

Since it doesn't, and life is basically meaningless, we can evaluate it only by terms or degrees of power. Life has greatest value wherever there has been the greatest effect of force, the greatest overflowing... and so I take this as my starting point.

Then you begin at a later point than I do.

Lyssa wrote:

I see things in degrees of strength. If life is doomed to fail - then I'll see it in terms of endurance, in terms of strength of how much it can resist, strength of how much entropy it can welcome and digest and wishes upon itself, etc. etc. This is not positivity, this is a measure of self-joy, of "aggressiveness".

Not only is it "doomed to fail" but it should not be allowed to succeed, even if there is a possibility for success. Because the fulfillment of an ideal is the end; no recurrence, to rebirth....Nirvana....quintessentially nihilistic.
I WANT to be reborn in any form possible, THIS is life-affirming. Not, I only want to be reborn as a human being only to dedicate my life to not being reborn again.
See the connection to Christianity?
Paradise IS the end.

Lyssa wrote:

I agree with you, and you put it better than me. So this 'turn' from death to anti-death is what I say death has overflowed into anti-death. A rarity that is overflowing.

"Overflowing" makes it seem as if it is all-powerful, when it is a degree of weakness.
All phenomena are decaying, animate and inanimate. The speed to which they are decaying and the resistance each offers to this decay is what differentiates them as material things or energies or life-forms.

Lyssa wrote:

To say Yea and embrace need/suffering needs an excess spirit; the Yea overflows from self-joy.

And yet this spirit will falter with age. Youthfulness is overflowing because attrition has yet to absorb most of its energies, and this is what is called "vigor".
With age the aggregate effects of resisting increase resulting in greater expenditure of energies to self-maintain. The tipping point is reached where finally the energies available to the organism are exceeded by those required to self-maintain itself agaisnt the flow; to resist.
This is decay, or entropy on display.

Satyr> And since organic life,

Organic life means there is some kind of organization or ordering, something has been appropriated that results in growth, a new becoming that has exceeded the previous state while the expenditure in appropriating is felt as need/hunger/exhaustion.
Life is a constant becoming and not a self-preservation.

Satyr> Then, "overflow" is only possible with life, and it is not a universal characteristic that predates the emergence of life. 

Yes; I'm saying Life is an overflowing, and a self-assertion and the universe as a whole may be interpreted in terms of a will to power.
I see the emergence of life as an excess, a rarity, given disorder/death being the norm. Heidegger remarks, primal violence is not an additional feature to life, it is its inherent being-ness. Hence he says, Life Stirs..., it overflows...

Satyr> No it isn't; hapiness, contentment, comfort, is the excess left-over once self-maintenance has been taken care of.

Or it is the feeling of a river flooding forth after being constricted by a damn for so long; making its effect felt like that can be a happy state for some.

Satyr> A strong man lifts 100 lbs. with ease and can hold it comfortably...a weaker man feels stressed by its mass. 
The strong man feels content, at ease, happy, but as he holds it the stress begins to build and build, as he is weakening and fatiguing as time goes on. He feeds, trying to maintain his strength but this is a losing cause and only able to produce ephemeral effects. Knowing this he cherishes the moment; he rejoices for the ability, no matter how fleeting it might be; he enjoys the sensation. 

And I will say the strong Dionysian man, knowing he will be worn out by the weight at some point, does not reproach it and even welcomes and bids it to be more terrible to him the next time; that he could discharge away his strength and endure this much terribleness, to be-come his max. possible is his excess spirit; he experiences his overflow, his unleashing power as a state of self-joy. He remains unwearied by losses and defeats. Some people crack, some people grow stronger with wounds. Poison stimulates some people to even greater health like a good tonic.

Satyr> The only reason to seek suffering is as a means to increase pleasure, or increase your level of toelranbce for suffering, so as to multiply the possibility for being content for longer periods of time. 

The deeper the roots, the greater the height of the tree. With every seeking of terribleness and capacity for pain, comes capacity for growth, power, and expansion. The Dionysian is not concerned with contentment.

Satyr> Who, the fuck, cares what Nietzsche thought, except as a reference point, a second-handaccount? 
Who is he the new messiah? Jesus for the modernistic mind? 
My goal is to dedicate my life to understanding how Nietzsche experienced this existence....fuck him!!!
Who, the hell, are you talking to? Some woman?!!!A fag?!!!
The only objection you have is that my "dedication" should be in deciphering Nietzsche and not Jesus? 
My interest in reality....the world. Not a man's insights. 

You asked if N. had overcome his ressentiment like the Antichrist he had written; and in reply, I was saying, everybody is bound to interpret N. their own way, so you should read him yourself if you want to.

Satyr> You are repalcing one authority with another, only claimnig the superiority of the one you surrender to. 
You are talking like Sauwelios. At least you are female, making it less insulting. 

That is your perspective of things.
As an Aside, and "generally speaking" and I speak for myself,,, I'd say it can also be a sign of a Master spirituality and a pantheistic one, when there can be spaces in life where there is honour in being a slave also. There is no shame in bestowing this honour on myself,,, why would I deny myself anything. Why waste anything that you can elevate. If I let myself become a mind-less regurgitating loyal stone, flat, enslaved, solid and firm, it is because I'm mind-full that one day I will need a ground to put my foot down on something strong to climb a hundred steps up. How insulting to think someone else can be a better slave and ground material than me! Wherever, whatever form, I would want to excel as its honour-giver if I can. If there is a joy and pride in discovering how much honour there can be in being a slave also, I'd not spare myself that joy and title. Its a lover's greed...

Satyr> And you should consider "Becoming" not as a movement away form decaying, but as a resistance to it.

For me, the flux of becoming involves both life and death, order and disorder, growth and decay, yes and no.

Satyr> Will to Life does not lead to immortality.

Yes, obv. not.

Satyr> Will to Power does not result in Godliness, in omnipotence, as weakness is what life is....we are all dying and too weak to do anything about it.

That's you; and I see it in terms of strength; a maximal self-deified feeling one can reach. I see will to power in degrees of strength, how much Godliness one can attain, how much it can resist and assert. There's a difference between acknowledging reality and resigning to its facts, and dancing with reality, dancing with death the totendanz, and learning to enjoy it since all facts are physiological interpretations of one's wtp. We can see the max. near-immortal heights we can reach and dissonances we can endure... That's my kind of wicked pessimism and monstrous, healthy laughter. To me, life and death are not opposites, but a single thread interacting con-/in-versing with itself; poetically, uroboric.

Satyr> ; a different way of experiencing the same process. 

I've been saying this since the start of this debate. Our points of departure are diff., and I affirm the Dionysian perspective.

Satyr> The "aim" is totally a human construct; it is the "towards" part of the Will to Whatever formula. 
This towards defines you as a person, as a personality as a self; it identifies you. What it points to is absent, and it is you who must decide what it is. 

Yes; and the highest being would posit himself as his goal, a nobility of being for oneself...

Satyr> This is why a child-like Dionysian joy must be found; a laughter of knowing the tragedy of it all. 

A laughter of knowing the tragedy of it all and still wanting to relive this same moment again; a laughter of having stared into the abyss and embracing the gaze of the abyss staring back at him with joy; the laughter of a wanderer who knows he can call even the worst hell as his home, he's always at home no matter where he goes, no matter what fate breaks on him, home is wherever he may roam...
"And the road becomes my bride
I have stripped of all but pride
So in her I do confide
And she keeps me satisfied
Gives me all I need

And with dust in throat I crave
Only knowledge will I save
To the game you stay a slave

Rover, wanderer
Nomad, vagabond
Call me what you will

But I'll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind anywhere
And I'll redefine anywhere

Anywhere I roam
Where I lay my head is home

(And the earth becomes my throne)

And the earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I've grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one

And my ties are severed clean
Less I have the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign

Rover, wanderer
Nomad, vagabond
Call me what you will
Yeah, you wi-i-i-ill

Carved upon my stone
My body lies, but still I roam,
Yeah yeah!

Wherever I may wander, wander, wander
Wherever I may roam..." [ze great Hetfield & co.]

Satyr> Dionysus laughs at Apollo, but also admires and honors Him.

To N., the Dionysian represents the capacity for the tragic view of life and the unflinching eye for the terrible and the real, while the Apollonian represents the capacity of projections and illusions, art, to maintain and defend the individual self from shattering against and over this tragic view. The Dionysian is Totalistic, cruel and compassionate; the Apollonian is Self-anchored, unambiguously clear and severe.
The Dionysian wants to expand consciousness, and the Apollonian wants to delimit, simplify, steady and solidify it. They are at war, and they co-operate too; and when Apollonian co-operates, it is so that the fluidity of the Dionysian can prevent its stunting and petrifaction at one level; Dionysian gathers together new material for it and helps elevate and expand the Apollonian consciousness; while the Apollonian pressure of boundaries helps the Dionysian from squandering into a formless heap and self-destruction.
Their inter-relation is described in Birth of Tragedy, sections 1, 4 and 9, and WTP 1050.
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Lyssa wrote:
Since it doesn't, and life is basically meaningless, we can evaluate it only by terms or degrees of power. Life has greatest value wherever there has been the greatest effect of force, the greatest overflowing... and so I take this as my starting point.
Satyr> Then you begin at a later point than I do. 

For me, self-joy is primal than pain.

Satyr> Because the fulfillment of an ideal is the end;

If there was an end, it would have been reached, so so-far we can say there is some sort of equilibrium, the kind that makes life still possible.

Satyr> no recurrence, to rebirth....Nirvana....quintessentially nihilistic. 

Affirming the ER means affirming the whole process that inherently has no goal or purpose whatsoever. Every moment of existence becomes a sense of triumph and indestructibility, as every event, every fate is experienced as one's own character, since everything is interlinked and represents the whole course of evolution.

Satyr> I WANT to be reborn in any form possible, THIS is life-affirming.

As much as a 'I will recur in this same form under this same sun and moon', etc.; this is also life-affirming.

Satyr> "Overflowing" makes it seem as if it is all-powerful, when it is a degree of weakness. 

That is the point; I am measuring it in degrees of strength and power; that is my perspective.

Lyssa wrote:
To say Yea and embrace need/suffering needs an excess spirit; the Yea overflows from self-joy.
Satyr> And yet this spirit will falter with age. Youthfulness is overflowing because attrition has yet to absorb most of its energies, and this is what is called "vigor". 
With age the aggregate effects of resisting increase resulting in greater expenditure of energies to self-maintain. The tipping point is reached where finally the energies available to the organism are exceeded by those required to self-maintain itself agaisnt the flow; to resist. 
This is decay, or entropy on display.

You can be old and still have a youthful spirit, the zeal of a child; its about a disposition towards the world. With some this fades; with some, it becomes a second body. Hence the Vedic Aryas were called "dvija" or "twice-born" in the same lifetime. N. called it a second childhood.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> And since organic life,

Organic life means there is some kind of organization or ordering, something has been appropriated that results in growth, a new becoming that has exceeded the previous state while the expenditure in appropriating is felt as need/hunger/exhaustion.
Life is a constant becoming and not a self-preservation.

The term "exceeded" is prejudiced by the fact that it is life that decrees itself to be exceeding what preceded it.
To "become" anything one must exhibit a unifying direction, which you would call a purpose or a meaning.
I act because I lack, not because I have....when I act the act is dependent on an I which is active.The I is activity, given direction with life.
The first concern of the organism, before it even begins to think about a direction or an object/objective is to maintain the possibility of giving direction.

I cannot grow unless I already have maintained the possibility (the spatial possibility) for growth.
Here we have two types of activity: one, the organism, a plant let's say, is activity manifest. It is active in feeding, in healing itself: two, this I as acting, can now direct its excess energies, which are activities left-over from its healing, feeding, etc. towards...
An inanimate object, a non-living phenomenon, is simply active with no direction. A rock does not grow or deteriorate fits own volition; it has no unity on its own....it is simply (inter)active and it exhibits activities which are similar to other phenomena, ergo it is then categorize, by a conscious, living, mind into a substance or a particular kind of matter.
It is the conscious, living, mind that unifies the rock into a thingness, by finding similarities or patterns of activity that differentiate a part of reality form the backdrop: this is distinguishing.
To distinguish is to separate, to discriminate, to detach a portion of reality from the rest of it, by using patterns of behavior or activity.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Then, "overflow" is only possible with life, and it is not a universal characteristic that predates the emergence of life.

Yes; I'm saying Life is an overflowing, and a self-assertion and the universe as a whole may be interpreted in terms of a will to power.
I see the emergence of life as an excess, a rarity, given disorder/death being the norm. Heidegger remarks, primal violence is not an additional feature to life, it is its inherent being-ness. Hence he says, Life Stirs..., it overflows...

No, because the universe is not teaming with life and life is nothing more than a state of dying, or the annimate resisting and returning back to a state of being inanimate....or will-less.
I don't say all of the universe is a Will to anything, since a Will implies consciousness which the universe does not posses outside of life.
It is life which gives, or project, upon the universe a Will.

The universe did not come into being when life emerged.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> No it isn't; hapiness, contentment, comfort, is the excess left-over once self-maintenance has been taken care of.

Or it is the feeling of a river flooding forth after being constricted by a damn for so long; making its effect felt like that can be a happy state for some.

Yes, and that's why I said only life produces excess and only if it is fit, or succesful in first self-preserving its capacity to collect energies in excess of tis needs.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> A strong man lifts 100 lbs. with ease and can hold it comfortably...a weaker man feels stressed by its mass.
The strong man feels content, at ease, happy, but as he holds it the stress begins to build and build, as he is weakening and fatiguing as time goes on. He feeds, trying to maintain his strength but this is a losing cause and only able to produce ephemeral effects. Knowing this he cherishes the moment; he rejoices for the ability, no matter how fleeting it might be; he enjoys the sensation.

And I will say the strong Dionysian man, knowing he will be worn out by the weight at some point, does not reproach it and even welcomes and bids it to be more terrible to him the next time; that he could discharge away his strength and endure this much terribleness, to be-come his max. possible is his excess spirit; he experiences his overflow, his unleashing power as a state of self-joy. He remains unwearied by losses and defeats. Some people crack, some people grow stronger with wounds. Poison stimulates some people to even greater health like a good tonic.

Now you are emoting.
How you deal with your situation is determined by your spirit.
How, for example, I deal with my mortality is an aspect of my character,a s this has been shaped by my past. But this does not change the fact that I am dying.

Jeez...Schopenhauer was right, and Nietzsche acknowledges this....where the difference lies in how each dealt with this truth.
Using a twist in semantics to turn the half-empty into half-full does not do away with the fact that there is no glass and half of what is not there is a human construct.

There is no boundary, no barrier, no presupposed vessel (God) which can then be filled and be called "overflowing". It is this absence which we feel as need...and life is a reaction to it. It tries to construct a boundary, a skin.
The universe is not the enclosed space within which tings happen...this is simply a metaphor a way of making the Flux comprehensible.
The only way to be overflowing is to set-up a border, a wall, (funny how liberalism, and nihilism, speaks of taking down personal walls and of stopping discrimination, no?)...it depends upon life.
This "construction of borders, of walls, of skin, IS what self-maintenance is all about. In order for an emergent unity, such as a biological life-form to have an excess of energies, so as to grow and procreate and create, it must construct a boundary within which it can accumulate energies and preserve them.
This is self-maintenance.
In order for a mind to think, to have the possibility of evolving the ability to think, it must first develop a skull and a brain...then it must continuously preserve, maintain, these constructs....unsuccessfully and ephemerally....even the skin is porous and lets in viruses and infections etc.
There is no absolute so the very vehicle under construction is imperfect and only superior or inferior in comparison with an other.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> The only reason to seek suffering is as a means to increase pleasure, or increase your level of toelranbce for suffering, so as to multiply the possibility for being content for longer periods of time.

The deeper the roots, the greater the height of the tree. With every seeking of terribleness and capacity for pain, comes capacity for growth, power, and expansion. The Dionysian is not concerned with contentment.

He is not concerned because he knows it is an illusion and only temporary.
He embraces suffering because he has no other choice....and only to increase his tolerance of it.

The path-of-least-resistance holds true in all parts of existing, except when it comes to a living organism. Only consciousness, having developed a certain degree of sophistication and being able to perceive and to project further than the immediate, can choose a path-of-more-resistance...and this to gain an advantage or to simply experience what existence is, since the sensation of existing is need/suffering.
This is the embracing of life.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Who, the fuck, cares what Nietzsche thought, except as a reference point, a second-handaccount?
Who is he the new messiah? Jesus for the modernistic mind?
My goal is to dedicate my life to understanding how Nietzsche experienced this existence....fuck him!!!
Who, the hell, are you talking to? Some woman?!!!A fag?!!!
The only objection you have is that my "dedication" should be in deciphering Nietzsche and not Jesus?
My interest in reality....the world. Not a man's insights.

You asked if N. had overcome his ressentiment like the Antichrist he had written; and in reply, I was saying, everybody is bound to interpret N. their own way, so you should read him yourself if you want to.

Are you implying that he had overcome his resentment...and was the overman?
For the Christians Jesus was the Son of God.

Was he not human, all too human?

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> You are repalcing one authority with another, only claimnig the superiority of the one you surrender to.
You are talking like Sauwelios. At least you are female, making it less insulting.

That is your perspective of things.
As an Aside, and "generally speaking" and I speak for myself,,, I'd say it can also be a sign of a Master spirituality and a pantheistic one, when there can be spaces in life where there is honour in being a slave also. There is no shame in bestowing this honour on myself,,, why would I deny myself anything. Why waste anything that you can elevate. If I let myself become a mind-less regurgitating loyal stone, flat, enslaved, solid and firm, it is because I'm mind-full that one day I will need a ground to put my foot down on something strong to climb a hundred steps up. How insulting to think someone else can be a better slave and ground material than me! Wherever, whatever form, I would want to excel as its honour-giver if I can. If there is a joy and pride in discovering how much honour there can be in being a slave also, I'd not spare myself that joy and title. Its a lover's greed...

There's a difference between saying "I believe this and this, and so and so agrees with me" and saying "I believe this and this BECAUSE so and so said so"

Someone saying so is not an argument. An argument, supported by a quote, is one referring to a commonly perceived phenomenon and offering a more plausible explanation for its emergence.
The phenomenon is simplified into a noumenon...which, if it is accurate enough, might result in a technique, a technology, for altering it or dealing with it.
But itself a noumenon is impotent. Will is how the noumenon is turned into a phenomenon. But if the noumenon is inaccurate, in error, delusions, to begin with - if its quality is low and has very few reference point with the phenomenon - then it is worthless and results in failure.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> And you should consider "Becoming" not as a movement away form decaying, but as a resistance to it.

For me, the flux of becoming involves both life and death, order and disorder, growth and decay, yes and no.

Because the mind is a tool for ordering it is attracted to order or to whatever promises order....if it is absent it must construct it.
So, you are correct, if you must create a self-enclosed, harmonious, abstraction of the whole; the universe, the cosmos, the one, then you must enclose it within a vessel of ambiguity, surrounded by imprecise borders, within which you can create an ordered facsimile of how you think are or should be working.
An abstraction is, after all, a mental construct, a mental model, a static representation of a fluid existence.
Even when Heraclitus tries to describe this fluidity he must contain it within the encompassing lines of a shore, as in a river's edge.
This is not an option, it is a necessity, a human limitation or how order is created by a mind evolved within a reality which is lacking it, or where order is fragmenting and becoming chaotic.
The truth is that the river flows, yes, but so does the river's edge....it's shores are also active to a lesser degree and there is no border....no glass.

So, yes, if you wish to create a more balanced mental abstraction of existence then you must assume, though you have no way of proving it or perceiving it, that as entropy increases, amking life possible as a (re)action to it, it is also simultaneously decreasing.
This is why I said that the metaphor of the Big Bang should not be taken as an event, as a singularity, but as an ongoing process. It is no beginnig and no end, as both these concepts imply an absolute state for which we have no evidence and have no argument to support it....without resorting to superstition and projected hopes or concluding things that are contradicted by the living experience: nihilism.

I've said that the Big Bang must be considered as being the same as the Big Crunch, and that as we seemingly move away from this process we are also moving towards it, from a different vantage point. The only thing that remains the same is the movement...which is another term for activity.
The Big Bang is now to be thought of as a process where the closest point to the absolute is approached but never, ever, attained.

The linear experience of time, as a towards increasing entropy, without ever reaching the state of absolute chaos, can be considered an aspect of the living condition. It is only towards increasing entropy where a life-form that resists can develop and find purpose and meaning...for in the other direction, metaphorically speaking, no life is necessary, as ordering is a given and a resistance to it would entail a disordering.

Having said all that, we cannot dismiss the experience of living as being accidental or insignificant or a result of some ploy.
If I feel need/suffering and imperfect and ignorant, and mortal, then this is because I am a manifestation of this existence and I only sense what it is.
To assume that the universe is also ordering itself, as it disorders, is to assume something contrary to my living experience and it is also a way of making this experience a farce, a joke.
Maybe this is why the Dionysian laughs.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Will to Power does not result in Godliness, in omnipotence, as weakness is what life is....we are all dying and too weak to do anything about it.

That's you; and I see it in terms of strength; a maximal self-deified feeling one can reach.

To simply say "This is your opinion" is to dismiss someone vies on the grounds that we are all equally ignorant.
a christian can turn to an atheist and instead of dealing with his arguments and how they refer to the living experience, he can dismiss him by saying "That's your opinion".
No, not all opinions are equal and perspectivism is not a carte blanche for any absurdity to find respectability.

You can't say "all is powerful" just because I say so or I prefer it to be so....when your very essence screams its weakness.

Lyssa wrote:

I see will to power in degrees of strength, how much Godliness one can attain, how much it can resist and assert.

Therefore, since God is unattainable or nowhere in evidence or improbable, all power is is a measurement of weakness.
The standard here is not your ideal, or your hope, or the projected objective/object....but reality as you perceive it.
You can't say all movement and change and fluidity is a degree of being static.
Being static and inert, Being, is nowhere in evidence because it is a mental abstraction trying to freeze a fluid existence into comprehensible bits.
God is the object/objective, the direction finder, the light in the darkness, not the actual. He is the Ideal to the Real.
A very masculine version of it; the masculine version of nihilism.
The feminine version, best reflected in eastern spirituality, is this idea of absolute emptiness, the total void, the complete and absolute chaos.

It was the population pressures that made the eastern dogmas reach feminization sooner.

Lyssa wrote:

There's a difference between acknowledging reality and resigning to its facts, and dancing with reality, dancing with death the totendanz, and learning to enjoy it since all facts are physiological interpretations of one's wtp. We can see the max. near-immortal heights we can reach and dissonances we can endure... That's my kind of wicked pessimism and monstrous, healthy laughter. To me, life and death are not opposites, but a single thread interacting con-/in-versing with itself; poetically, uroboric.

Who said anything about resignation?
You know what's even worse than surrender?
Delusion. The cowardice of convincing yourself things are other than they appear to be - the opposite, in fact - because you cannot deal with reality but neither surrender to it.
If my son turns into a homosexual, will I not be a coward if I suddenly change my tune about what homosexuality is because I cannot deal with the reality of it or because I cannot embrace my son, despite his failing?
Is this not the same as not accepting self because you are imperfect, when it is your imperfection that makes you necessary and it is this imperfection which gives your live purpose, direction, meaning?

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> The "aim" is totally a human construct; it is the "towards" part of the Will to Whatever formula.
This towards defines you as a person, as a personality as a self; it identifies you. What it points to is absent, and it is you who must decide what it is.

Yes; and the highest being would posit himself as his goal, a nobility of being for oneself...

If by this you mean embracing the entirety of your past, including your creed and sex and all this implies.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Dionysus laughs at Apollo, but also admires and honors Him.

To N., the Dionysian represents the capacity for the tragic view of life and the unflinching eye for the terrible and the real, while the Apollonian represents the capacity of projections and illusions, art, to maintain and defend the individual self from shattering against and over this tragic view. The Dionysian is Totalistic, cruel and compassionate; the Apollonian is Self-anchored, unambiguously clear and severe.

Do you see me now?

Lyssa wrote:

Lyssa wrote:
Since it doesn't, and life is basically meaningless, we can evaluate it only by terms or degrees of power. Life has greatest value wherever there has been the greatest effect of force, the greatest overflowing... and so I take this as my starting point.
Satyr> Then you begin at a later point than I do.

For me, self-joy is primal than pain.

Then you are foolish and delusional...but in a good way.
Beats being bitter and insane about it.

Need drives all life....the desire for what is missing.....the desire to avoid pain/suffering.

Consciousness precedes self-consciousness. Only the most self-conscious, the most aware, can feel this existential joy...animals simply feel need and pain and suffering....and the temporary relief from them as pleasure.

It's the kind of joy that relishes itself in the pits of Hell. How funny the threat of eternal damnation is to one who simply wishes to feel and to be alive and conscious.
Only the withering, cowardly, soul imagines paradise as desirable: the eternal bliss of being a pet.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> I WANT to be reborn in any form possible, THIS is life-affirming.

As much as a 'I will recur in this same form under this same sun and moon', etc.; this is also life-affirming.

Then you offer a convenient caveat...you love life but only under these conditions.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> "Overflowing" makes it seem as if it is all-powerful, when it is a degree of weakness.

That is the point; I am measuring it in degrees of strength and power; that is my perspective.

That's like saying that you measure beauty by the degree of perfection it displays, or life by the degree of immortality is displays, or knowledge by the degree of omniscience present.
you begin with an absolute given, a positive one, and work backwards. i work forwards, constructing from the bottom>up.

The difference is this: Top<>Down versus Bottom<>Up thinking.

Satyr> I act because I lack, not because I have....

I act because I want to accumulate more force than my present state. I will to be more, which makes me approp. the other and this expending of my present state in becoming more creates the feeling of hunger and exhaustion and makes me want to accumulate more... At no moment, am I content with just preserving myself.

Satyr> The first concern of the organism, before it even begins to think about a direction or an object/objective is to maintain the possibility of giving direction.

The will appoints direction, yes, but the organism is concerned with maintenance only because it is driven to exceed, it wants to grow more powerful.

Satyr> An inanimate object, a non-living phenomenon, is simply active with no direction. A rock does not grow or deteriorate fits own volition; it has no unity on its own....it is simply (inter)active and it exhibits activities which are similar to other phenomena, ergo it is then categorize, by a conscious, living, mind into a substance or a particular kind of matter.
It is the conscious, living, mind that unifies the rock into a thingness, by finding similarities or patterns of activity that differentiate a part of reality form the backdrop: this is distinguishing.
To distinguish is to separate, to discriminate, to detach a portion of reality from the rest of it, by using patterns of behavior or activity.

The will to live is only one kind of will to power; in the inorganic world we can only speak of a rock making its effect felt by its beingness-in-becoming, by the degree of power it asserts its rockness that is perceived by our mind, before it too is transformed into the shoresands or into the water. 'We' can speak of a transformation and an overflowing of forms as the overall character of life... a growth/decay from simple to complex forms and vice-versa.

Satyr> I don't say all of the universe is a Will to anything, since a Will implies consciousness which the universe does not posses outside of life.
It is life which gives, or project, upon the universe a Will.

I'm saying it is Life which can interpret the whole universe in terms of a will to power.

Satyr> Yes, and that's why I said only life produces excess and only if it is fit, or succesful in first self-preserving its capacity to collect energies in excess of tis needs.

And I say, its the originary drive to unleash, to exceed, to become, that makes self-preservation a secondary drive.

Lyssa wrote:
And I will say the strong Dionysian man, knowing he will be worn out by the weight at some point, does not reproach it and even welcomes and bids it to be more terrible to him the next time; that he could discharge away his strength and endure this much terribleness, to be-come his max. possible is his excess spirit; he experiences his overflow, his unleashing power as a state of self-joy. He remains unwearied by losses and defeats. Some people crack, some people grow stronger with wounds. Poison stimulates some people to even greater health like a good tonic.
Satyr> Now you are emoting.
How you deal with your situation is determined by your spirit.
How, for example, I deal with my mortality is an aspect of my character,a s this has been shaped by my past. But this does not change the fact that I am dying.
Jeez...Schopenhauer was right, and Nietzsche acknowledges this....where the difference lies in how each dealt with this truth.
Using a twist in semantics to turn the half-empty into half-full does not do away with the fact that there is no glass and half of what is not there is a human construct.

I am not emoting; trying to make the point that the Dionysian urge is more than just being concerned with preserving itself intact; not only does it not mind, but it even welcomes its being shattered by such terrible weights. It is this Schop.'s will-to-live of all beings against which N. critiques him. Schop. says all beings wish to avoid death; N. says, all beings wish to become more and even affirmatively welcome their own self-destruction; to perish doing their best...
By the way, I would caution you from assessing N. and his critique of Schopenhauer from what I say. I'm no authority on either. My position is merely my grasp of N. possible by any un-philosophical mind.
And I want to say, it is with you and reading you, that I have 'felt' how a slight shift of terms and perspective can actually inform such a wide variance in our experience of life. Its just an amazing experience...

Satyr> The universe is not the enclosed space within which tings happen...this is simply a metaphor a way of making the Flux comprehensible.
The only way to be overflowing is to set-up a border, a wall, (funny how liberalism, and nihilism, speaks of taking down personal walls and of stopping discrimination, no?)...it depends upon life.
This "construction of borders, of walls, of skin, IS what self-maintenance is all about. In order for an emergent unity, such as a biological life-form to have an excess of energies, so as to grow and procreate and create, it must construct a boundary within which it can accumulate energies and preserve them.
This is self-maintenance.

Yes! That is what I am saying... in order that there might be overflowing, self-maintenance and walls kick in as a secondary drive. It creates resistances against which it can overflow and exceed itself.

Satyr> Are you implying that he had overcome his resentment...and was the overman?

Ressentiment against what? If you mean Xt., def. yes. And I'm saying no such ridiculous thing as N. being the Overman; that's laughable!

Satyr> For the Christians Jesus was the Son of God.
Was he not human, all too human?

Indeed. N. is not my God!!

Satyr> There's a difference between saying "I believe this and this, and so and so agrees with me" and saying "I believe this and this BECAUSE so and so said so"

Did I do such a thing, or are you talking of Sauwelios?

Satyr> Someone saying so is not an argument. An argument, supported by a quote, is one referring to a commonly perceived phenomenon and offering a more plausible explanation for its emergence.
The phenomenon is simplified into a noumenon...which, if it is accurate enough, might result in a technique, a technology, for altering it or dealing with it.
But itself a noumenon is impotent. Will is how the noumenon is turned into a phenomenon. But if the noumenon is inaccurate, in error, delusions, to begin with - if its quality is low and has very few reference point with the phenomenon - then it is worthless and results in failure.

Fine, then you read and offer your full critique of N., if you care to sometime.
I have a certain pic. in my mind and I find its resonance in N.; wherever I have quoted him so far, it has not been as an authority figure, but as a source of clarity for better words, and to acknowledge and give him due credit for those words.
Quotes prompt interested readers to explore and assess on their own; my own discovery of him was such an accidental stumbling,, and so I take referencing seriously. One never knows what even one small quote reference can ring and awaken in the mind of another... its a gift I received and I pass on.

Satyr> The truth is that the river flows, yes, but so does the river's edge....it's shores are also active to a lesser degree and there is no border....no glass.

Yes.

Satyr> So, yes, if you wish to create a more balanced mental abstraction of existence then you must assume, though you have no way of proving it or perceiving it, that as entropy increases, amking life possible as a (re)action to it, it is also simultaneously decreasing.
This is why I said that the metaphor of the Big Bang should not be taken as an event, as a singularity, but as an ongoing process. It is no beginnig and no end, as both these concepts imply an absolute state for which we have no evidence and have no argument to support it....without resorting to superstition and projected hopes or concluding things that are contradicted by the living experience: nihilism.

Agreed.

Satyr> I've said that the Big Bang must be considered as being the same as the Big Crunch, and that as we seemingly move away from this process we are also moving towards it, from a different vantage point. The only thing that remains the same is the movement...which is another term for activity.
The Big Bang is now to be thought of as a process where the closest point to the absolute is approached but never, ever, attained.

Right.

Satyr> To assume that the universe is also ordering itself, as it disorders, is to assume something contrary to my living experience and it is also a way of making this experience a farce, a joke.
Maybe this is why the Dionysian laughs.

You could say that since the Dionysian is the will to accomodate max. contradictions possible in his heart. But like I said, there are many kinds of Dionysians, and this could be yours. My Dionysian laughs for the reasons I've prv. noted.

Lyssa wrote:
Satyr> Will to Power does not result in Godliness, in omnipotence, as weakness is what life is....we are all dying and too weak to do anything about it.
Lyssa wrote:
That's you; and I see it in terms of strength; a maximal self-deified feeling one can reach.
Satyr> To simply say "This is your opinion" is to dismiss someone vies on the grounds that we are all equally ignorant.
a christian can turn to an atheist and instead of dealing with his arguments and how they refer to the living experience, he can dismiss him by saying "That's your opinion".
No, not all opinions are equal and perspectivism is not a carte blanche for any absurdity to find respectability.
You can't say "all is powerful" just because I say so or I prefer it to be so....when your very essence screams its weakness.
Therefore, since God is unattainable or nowhere in evidence or improbable, all power is is a measurement of weakness.

Dismiss? I'm trying to hold two same/diff. worldviews together at the same time without compromising the integrity of either,, isn't that obvious by now? The reason this debate is going is because I wanted to understand Nothingness in terms of your lack/need perspective. And I perfectly understand it.
A mid-noon can be described in terms of weakening daylight or strengthening twilight... and I agree that no two perspectives are or can be equal. I never said "all is powerful", that is your misreading; I said I see everything in terms or degrees of power, of relative strength attained so far, god-like men who have shaped humanity as a whole, the most near-immortal heroes, of max. dissonance a type of man is able to hold inside him,, because the universe itself is full and full of contradictions and dissonance... fire and water and air such multipodes co-exist in this world acting against and together with each other... to hold so much dissonance and not break down, to see life still balancing itself 'so far',, this strength is worthy of imitation and comparison, which is what a Dionysian world-view does.

Satyr> Delusion. The cowardice of convincing yourself things are other than they appear to be - the opposite, in fact - because you cannot deal with reality but neither surrender to it.

That the Dionysian state is associated with a certain Madness cannot be denied, but it is the kind of madness from seeing and wanting to affirm the all too abysmal nature of reality. Let me describe it another way;

"Aikido is often translated as "the Way of unifying (with) life energy". Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of the attack rather than opposing it head-on."
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You can see how the above defending-by-not-defending or effortless-effort by blending in past the boundaries and approp. the other is Dionysian;

or, Taichi;
"The philosophy of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is that, if one uses hardness to resist violent force, then both sides are certain to be injured at least to some degree. Such injury, according to t'ai chi theory, is a natural consequence of meeting brute force with brute force. Instead, students are taught not to directly fight or resist an incoming force, but to meet it in softness and follow its motion while remaining in physical contact until the incoming force of attack exhausts itself or can be safely redirected, meeting yang with yin. Done correctly, this yin/yang or yang/yin balance in combat, or in a broader philosophical sense, is a primary goal of t'ai chi ch'uan training. Lao Tzu provided the archetype for this in the Tao Te Ching when he wrote, "The soft
and the pliable will defeat the hard and strong."
T'ai chi's martial aspect relies on sensitivity to the opponent's movements and center of gravity dictating appropriate responses. Effectively affecting or "capturing" the opponent's center of gravity immediately upon contact is trained as the primary goal of the martial t'ai chi student."
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or wu wei;
"Wu may be translated as not have or without; Wei may be translated as do, act, serve as, govern or effort. The literal meaning of Wu Wei is "without action", "without effort", or "without control", and is often included in the paradox wei wu wei: "action without action" or "effortless doing". The practice of wu wei and the efficacy of wei wu wei are fundamental tenets in Chinese thought and have been mostly emphasized by the Taoist school. The aim of wu wei is to achieve a state of perfect equilibrium, or alignment with the Tao, and, as a result, obtain an irresistible form of "soft and invisible" power.
The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way. When you are playing an instrument, if you start thinking about playing the instrument, then you will interfere with your playing. It is aimless action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will develop anxiety about this goal."
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or wing chun;
"Tension reduces punching speed and power. Muscles act in pairs in opposition to each other (e.g. biceps and triceps). If the arm is tensed, maximum punching speed cannot be achieved as the biceps will be opposing the extension of the arm. In Wing Chun, the arm should be relaxed before beginning the punching motion.
Unnecessary muscle tension wastes energy and causes fatigue. Tense, stiff arms are less fluid and sensitive during trapping and chi sao.
A tense, stiff limb provides an easy handle for an opponent to push or pull with, whereas a relaxed limb provides an opponent less to work with.
A relaxed, but focused, limb affords the ability to feel "holes" or weaknesses in the opponent's structure. With the correct forwarding these "holes" grant a path into attacking the opponent.
Muscular struggle reduces a fight to who is stronger. Minimum brute strength in all movement becomes an equalizer in uneven strength confrontations. This is very much in the spirit of the tale of Ng Mui."
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The Dionysian is the opposite of cowardly; its a different kind of fasci-nating, laughing aggression.


Lyssa wrote:
To N., the Dionysian represents the capacity for the tragic view of life and the unflinching eye for the terrible and the real, while the Apollonian represents the capacity of projections and illusions, art, to maintain and defend the individual self from shattering against and over this tragic view. The Dionysian is Totalistic, cruel and compassionate; the Apollonian is Self-anchored, unambiguously clear and severe.
Satyr> Do you see me now?

Yes; I have never denied the Apollonian.
How could I describe it if I didn't understand it...
I even understand that the Apollonian cannot afford to affirm the totalistic Dionysian view as this would shatter its individuation; it is a round-the-clock rigid Self defending perspective, and such is necessary. It has to be like this and this is what makes it Apollonian.

Lyssa wrote:
For me, self-joy is primal than pain.
Satyr> Then you are foolish and delusional...but in a good way.
Beats being bitter and insane about it.
Need drives all life....the desire for what is missing.....the desire to avoid pain/suffering.

Couldn't help it, you made me laugh; aaaisshhhh
Joy as in [self-focussed aggression] having itself as goal, and the desire is not to avoid anything, but affirm, embrace and overcome everything possible. Yes there are base kinds of life that just want to avoid pain/suffering, like the Xt. (anti-)life, and so the Dionysian view would see everything in terms of its own capacity for enduring max. pain/suffering.

Satyr> Consciousness precedes self-consciousness. Only the most self-conscious, the most aware, can feel this existential joy...animals simply feel need and pain and suffering....and the temporary relief from them as pleasure.

That's why the Dionysian world view sees everything in terms of Its strength, how unjoyous the weak are, and how much more joy is still possible by the Overman.

Lyssa wrote:
As much as a 'I will recur in this same form under this same sun and moon', etc.; this is also life-affirming.
Satyr> Then you offer a convenient caveat...you love life but only under these conditions.

Not at all; since nothing exists in isolation, and everything is interconnected, what conditions me conditions and is conditioned by everything else. Love of all fatality as a whole. Disturb and deny one thing, and you deny everything. That's why the Dionysian denies nothing, not even death.

Satyr> That's like saying that you measure beauty by the degree of perfection it displays, or life by the degree of immortality is displays, or knowledge by the degree of omniscience present.
you begin with an absolute given, a positive one, and work backwards. i work forwards, constructing from the bottom>up.

No, no. No omnipotent gods, beings, or absolutes. Let me say it diff. You measure things by how close they are to the Real. That is your std.
The Dionysian measures things by how totalistically [max. dissonance] encompassing things are of the Real, like life as a whole is. That is its std.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> I act because I lack, not because I have....

I act because I want to accumulate more force than my present state. I will to be more, which makes me approp. the other and this expending of my present state in becoming more creates the feeling of hunger and exhaustion and makes me want to accumulate more... At no moment, am I content with just preserving myself.

No, you say this after the fact. You, because you are conscious, give a reason, a reasoning, to your actions.
An amoeba, a plant, does not care for such motives and motivations, it acts out of sheer need.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> The first concern of the organism, before it even begins to think about a direction or an object/objective is to maintain the possibility of giving direction.

The will appoints direction, yes, but the organism is concerned with maintenance only because it is driven to exceed, it wants to grow more powerful.

No, it wants to "grow more powerful" after it takes care of its immediate needs.
Once the damage, the wound, is healed, does the organism appropriate resources towards growth or reproduction.
The organism cares not for growth or ideals or ideas if it is suffering...which is what need turns to when it is left unsatisfied.

Entropy increases, and this includes the organism, which is deteriorating along with everything else. To "grow" it must first deal with the ongoing attrition, correct what damage has been done, if it was not corrected promptly, and then expand its dimensions, or increase its possibilities, as space is another way of intpereting possibility.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> An inanimate object, a non-living phenomenon, is simply active with no direction. A rock does not grow or deteriorate fits own volition; it has no unity on its own....it is simply (inter)active and it exhibits activities which are similar to other phenomena, ergo it is then categorize, by a conscious, living, mind into a substance or a particular kind of matter.
It is the conscious, living, mind that unifies the rock into a thingness, by finding similarities or patterns of activity that differentiate a part of reality form the backdrop: this is distinguishing.
To distinguish is to separate, to discriminate, to detach a portion of reality from the rest of it, by using patterns of behavior or activity.

The will to live is only one kind of will to power; in the inorganic world we can only speak of a rock making its effect felt by its beingness-in-becoming, by the degree of power it asserts its rockness that is perceived by our mind, before it too is transformed into the shoresands or into the water. 'We' can speak of a transformation and an overflowing of forms as the overall character of life... a growth/decay from simple to complex forms and vice-versa.

No, the only thing that changes is the moniker, the metaphor, the symbol, the nuance, the projected absent absolute is given by the mind project in git.
It is because the absent is missing which lends itself to be interpreted in whatever way imaginable.

You can place after the "Will to" any concept you wish....if it means something absolute or is defined as something complete, static, omnipotent, then it is nothing but an abstraction which if taken literally leads to retards into thinking all sorts of absurdities.

The rock, the element, the phenomenon, asserts nothing...it has no will and no consciousness. It is the observing conscious mind, which interprets a congruence of flow, exhibiting a patters, in a manner which makes sense to it.....or in a manner which its mind has evolved to interpret phenomena: a priori concepts.

For example, the rock's firmness is nothing more than the mind interpreting the specific rate of flow in relation to itself.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> I don't say all of the universe is a Will to anything, since a Will implies consciousness which the universe does not posses outside of life.
It is life which gives, or project, upon the universe a Will.

I'm saying it is Life which can interpret the whole universe in terms of a will to power.

Yes, language is an artistic form using metaphors.

So, there are superior and inferior ways of expressing or symbolizing reality.
Will to Power just happens to be one of them.
I prefer Will to Life.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Yes, and that's why I said only life produces excess and only if it is fit, or successful in first self-preserving its capacity to collect energies in excess of its needs.

And I say, its the originary drive to unleash, to exceed, to become, that makes self-preservation a secondary drive.

This is your religious faith.
I do not presume something. I report things as I perceive them trying not to add anything and to presume nothing.

Lyssa wrote:

Lyssa wrote:
And I will say the strong Dionysian man, knowing he will be worn out by the weight at some point, does not reproach it and even welcomes and bids it to be more terrible to him the next time; that he could discharge away his strength and endure this much terribleness, to be-come his max. possible is his excess spirit; he experiences his overflow, his unleashing power as a state of self-joy. He remains unwearied by losses and defeats. Some people crack, some people grow stronger with wounds. Poison stimulates some people to even greater health like a good tonic.
Satyr> Now you are emoting.
How you deal with your situation is determined by your spirit.
How, for example, I deal with my mortality is an aspect of my character,a s this has been shaped by my past. But this does not change the fact that I am dying.
Jeez...Schopenhauer was right, and Nietzsche acknowledges this....where the difference lies in how each dealt with this truth.
Using a twist in semantics to turn the half-empty into half-full does not do away with the fact that there is no glass and half of what is not there is a human construct.

I am not emoting; trying to make the point that the Dionysian urge is more than just being concerned with preserving itself intact; not only does it not mind, but it even welcomes its being shattered by such terrible weights. It is this Schop.'s will-to-live of all beings against which N. critiques him. Schop. says all beings wish to avoid death; N. says, all beings wish to become more and even affirmatively welcome their own self-destruction; to perish doing their best...

And I'm with Schopenhauer in this, taking Nietzsche's reactinos as a youthful rebelliousness, making it clear why he attracts the young to his call.

The reason why I am with Schopenhauer is that without life there is no willing anything....there is no possibility for anything.

Nietzsche's position should be taken as the Nihilistic tendency that it is: a suicidal drive.
But let us not be so harsh.
The limit here is obvious, in Nietzsche it is the absence of omnipotence, in Schopenhauer it is the absence of immortality.
Both "omnipotence" and "immortality" are different ways of describing the same concept: the absolute.

For Schopenhauer life is so precious, self so wonderful, that wishing to preserve it as long as possible seems like a rational thing to do; for Nietzsche the end is inevitable so why not go out with a blaze of glory?!!!

In both cases it is the absence of the absolute which makes both stances possible, as (re)actions to it. One is ascetic, the other heroic.
The latter is idealistic and it takes into account how one is perceived if it does not simply wish to experience a level of living, the experience of living, before the inevitable demise. To comfort itself or to make this suicidal tendency admirable he must believe in eternal recurrence. The sudden burst of glory cannot be a one time deal, otherwise it is such a waste.

One wishes to leave a mark, to be remembered, the other just wishes to enjoy its brief stay, to see, to learn and to perish.
Remember Nietzsche admired Jesus and Socrates even if he did not agree with their motives. They sacrificed themselves to make a point to the rabble, the manimals.
Did he not also wish to make a mark?

The difference is one of age.
I, for one, could care less about making a mark amongst the sheeple. They are not even of my kind. Might as well wish to be admired by the worms or by pigs or by cows.
Who cares?

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> The universe is not the enclosed space within which tings happen...this is simply a metaphor a way of making the Flux comprehensible.
The only way to be overflowing is to set-up a border, a wall, (funny how liberalism, and nihilism, speaks of taking down personal walls and of stopping discrimination, no?)...it depends upon life.
This "construction of borders, of walls, of skin, IS what self-maintenance is all about. In order for an emergent unity, such as a biological life-form to have an excess of energies, so as to grow and procreate and create, it must construct a boundary within which it can accumulate energies and preserve them.
This is self-maintenance.

Yes! That is what I am saying... in order that there might be overflowing, self-maintenance and walls kick in as a secondary drive. It creates resistances against which it can overflow and exceed itself.

No, not a "secondary drive" as there is no will to anything without self-preservation.
What is willing and how if it is dead?
That's like saying that the primary drive is to want to procreate...but if one does not take care of one's immediate survival needs, requirements, there is no will at all.
If you want to claim that Will is external to life, then you are back to God.

The madness of Dionysus is that he can embrace death because he knows that it is inevitable anyhow. All he wills is how he goes out.

Lyssa wrote:

Indeed. N. is not my God!!

A messiah, perchance?

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> Someone saying so is not an argument. An argument, supported by a quote, is one referring to a commonly perceived phenomenon and offering a more plausible explanation for its emergence.
The phenomenon is simplified into a noumenon...which, if it is accurate enough, might result in a technique, a technology, for altering it or dealing with it.
But itself a noumenon is impotent. Will is how the noumenon is turned into a phenomenon. But if the noumenon is inaccurate, in error, delusions, to begin with - if its quality is low and has very few reference point with the phenomenon - then it is worthless and results in failure.

Fine, then you read and offer your full critique of N., if you care to sometime.
I have a certain pic. in my mind and I find its resonance in N.; wherever I have quoted him so far, it has not been as an authority figure, but as a source of clarity for better words, and to acknowledge and give him due credit for those words.
Quotes prompt interested readers to explore and assess on their own; my own discovery of him was such an accidental stumbling,, and so I take referencing seriously. One never knows what even one small quote reference can ring and awaken in the mind of another... its a gift I received and I pass on.

Nietzsche does not loom so largely in my psyche for me to want to do this.

But that he does in the minds of many, in this post-modern era, where civilization is dealing culture a death-blow, then he is a social phenomenon I must deal with.
I found his prose wonderful and his critique of Christianity sublime and his deciphering of modern psychologies, inspiring, but as a meta-physician I found him wanting.

Heidegger did a far better job and so did Schopenhauer who inspired him.

The whole "will to" is not his...the "eternal recurrence" is an adaptation of Hinduism and he was a pupil of Heraclitus.

In a world of nihilistic tendencies and of numbness, I can understand his appeal. His words make the blood boil and the spirit skip.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> To assume that the universe is also ordering itself, as it disorders, is to assume something contrary to my living experience and it is also a way of making this experience a farce, a joke.
Maybe this is why the Dionysian laughs.

You could say that since the Dionysian is the will to accomodate max. contradictions possible in his heart. But like I said, there are many kinds of Dionysians, and this could be yours. My Dionysian laughs for the reasons I've prv. noted.

Then the metaphor of the god Dionysus lends itself to your spirit and allows it to express itself through it.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> To simply say "This is your opinion" is to dismiss someone vies on the grounds that we are all equally ignorant.
a christian can turn to an atheist and instead of dealing with his arguments and how they refer to the living experience, he can dismiss him by saying "That's your opinion".
No, not all opinions are equal and perspectivism is not a carte blanche for any absurdity to find respectability.
You can't say "all is powerful" just because I say so or I prefer it to be so....when your very essence screams its weakness.
Therefore, since God is unattainable or nowhere in evidence or improbable, all power is is a measurement of weakness.

Dismiss? I'm trying to hold two same/diff. worldviews together at the same time without compromising the integrity of either,, isn't that obvious by now? The reason this debate is going is because I wanted to understand Nothingness in terms of your lack/need perspective. And I perfectly understand it.
A mid-noon can be described in terms of weakening daylight or strengthening twilight... and I agree that no two perspectives are or can be equal.

Then you haven't fully understood me, or accepted my views.
Yes, the mid-noon is the rarity, the exception, when behind the "light" an eternal darkness looms and is increasing.

Increasing entropy, amongst other things, means a decrease in energies, in activities, in light, in heat.....This is not the "equal" to a light burning in the night.
Darkness is not degrees of luminescence.
The standard is "negative". Only against this does the positive make sense and acquire value and dignity.

Lyssa wrote:

The Dionysian is the opposite of cowardly; its a different kind of fasci-nating, laughing aggression.

Yes.

Lyssa wrote:

Lyssa wrote:
To N., the Dionysian represents the capacity for the tragic view of life and the unflinching eye for the terrible and the real, while the Apollonian represents the capacity of projections and illusions, art, to maintain and defend the individual self from shattering against and over this tragic view. The Dionysian is Totalistic, cruel and compassionate; the Apollonian is Self-anchored, unambiguously clear and severe.
Satyr> Do you see me now?

Yes; I have never denied the Apollonian.
How could I describe it if I didn't understand it...
I even understand that the Apollonian cannot afford to affirm the totalistic Dionysian view as this would shatter its individuation; it is a round-the-clock rigid Self defending perspective, and such is necessary. It has to be like this and this is what makes it Apollonian.

Then you will see me trying to become flexible and more rigid at the same time: understanding and unforgiving, at the same time; male and female, at the same time.

A fine specimen of deluded Apollonian "masculinity" you can find in the Dungeon.
We keep such animals caged, tolerating its walks amongst us wearing makes, because it is consternating.

Lyssa wrote:

Lyssa wrote:
For me, self-joy is primal than pain.
Satyr> Then you are foolish and delusional...but in a good way.
Beats being bitter and insane about it.
Need drives all life....the desire for what is missing.....the desire to avoid pain/suffering.

Couldn't help it, you made me laugh; aaaisshhhh
Joy as in [self-focussed aggression] having itself as goal, and the desire is not to avoid anything, but affirm, embrace and overcome everything possible. Yes there are base kinds of life that just want to avoid pain/suffering, like the Xt. (anti-)life, and so the Dionysian view would see everything in terms of its own capacity for enduring max. pain/suffering.

I seek a middle ground: to suffer under controlled conditions.

Whatever pain suffering I've endured and can now laugh about and appreciate I have not sought out. In fact I find is ridiculous to pursue the inevitable.
It's inevitable, so why pursue it when it will come to you even when you are trying to ignore it or avoid it?
For me asceticism is a method of preparation and control is a way of putting up walls agaisnt a coming formidable foe. It can only buy me more time....and time is all I am.
A lion goes after the weakest gazelle, not the biggest, fastest and strongest. It does not tempt fate when fate is a given.
No matter how much it eats it too shall perish, either by claw or by bug.

It is only the sheltered that play these fantasy scenarios where they die valiantly and are eternally remembered. Even Hitler and Napoleon shall be forgotten in time.

When an organism goes agaisnt this drive it is usually for the purpose of overcoming a great obstacle or circumventing a challenger. It takes a great risk to achieve a goal it values above life itself.

Pardon me, but I fear I'm just going to keep repeating myself and have really nothing new to add. I appreciate everything you've written so far. While I don't believe in final conclusions, I'd like to wrap this up, as there is that saying, a good music knows how, when, and where to end else it becomes noise. If not an end, I'd atleast like to put a pause on this from my side.  Three points:

1. Dionysian view: Life is a special case in which everything wants to accumulate force, to add things to itself; it is a striving of power for power. Pleasure and displeasure are consequences of this. Pleasure is the dissatisfaction of the will which is never content till it finds things against and over which it can resist and expend itself. This discontent and pain of resistance acts as a stimulus to life; not as a reproach against it. When an amoeba or some such with a certain store of force and capacity to act thrusts itself out to be master of its immediate environment, it strives to accumulate more force and assimilate anything in its way, starting with the path of least resistance, essentially striving against anything that resists; and when it does assimilate, it experiences growth, feels nourished, and the slight expenditure of force is experienced as hunger,, and it keeps on seeking more and more things that resist it. It is never content with just maintaining itself; this it does -when urged by its primary mode to strive for power, to seek more and more resistances again and again,, never wishing to avoid the displeasure in resistance as evil or a reproach to life. It is an excess and strength of health, an aggressive joy that affirms this displeasure as a stimulus to life.
Apollonian view: From the Apollonian perspective, which is self-anchored, a will to higher and higher self-consciousness,, entropy is seen as a disordering force that the self needs to resist against, defend against, maintain against. Its will-to-knowledge is a form of will-to-power that moves towards a clarity and unambiguity to keep on simplifying away, projecting illusions and art and beauty to stay off the encroaching complexity of entropy, preventing its boundaries being overwhelmed. Self-maintenance is its priority. Only if there is a self, can there be a self to evolve. It experiences this defensive stand against entropy that drains it as need/suffering, and nourishment that restores self-maintenance as pleasure. The Apollonian of the strong, till here, that does not look at pain as an argument against life, is still Life-affirming and undoubtedly Heroic, like the divine Zeus protecting the Order of his realm and reign. The Apollonian std. in the weak and impoverished natures that have become decadent, the instincts of what is 'self' become uncertain as the ordering principle is lost or weak, so it starts to moralize and split life as good and evil, pleasure/displeasure, etc. just as the Dionysian in the weak leads to degeneracy of an excess.  

2. So if we understand in the above, that in the Dionysian world view, everything actively seeks resistances, and pleasure is experienced as an unleashing out and discontent at just self-preservation, wanting more and more resistances against which it can overflow,,, then we understand the Dionysian tragic view of life and the pessimism of strength. Tragedy doesn't mean submission or resignation before the inevitable, but to represent the terrible inevitable in itself is an instinct for power. To actively seek out the inevitable as a resistance against which It can masterfully overflow is a state of strength. Since entropy/displeasure is the norm, then how much dissonance or inevitability it can balance is a measure of how totalistically it can represent the norm, and affirm the real. Joy becomes the aggressive capacity or strength for unwearied suffering, again and again, to deny nothing. Affirming the inevitable is to affirm Life and the universe as a whole which somehow made that life possible. The Dionysian is the excess economy of the Fool who keeps on expending because his strength itself no longer endures him and it drives him onward. He has no choice! It is a 'mad' 'ecstatic' psychic state. "To perish is better than to become half-hearted and poisonous."
Hitler and Napoleon may one day be inevitably forgotten, and even exceeded by someone even more joyous and powerful, and the whole universe itself may collapse, but if the total character of the world itself lacks meaning, in that there is no such thing as a "totality", then how does one evaluate the intensity of a brief fruitful life against a duration of a longer stabler life?! A beautiful life can also mean someone who wills to die at the right time - that too is an art of living well! Who can measure the value of a Hitler or Napoleon, and the eternal ramifications of their actions, their life, their affect/effect on the grand course of things in the tremendous star-wreckage? Who can say what they did and how they acted and lived is/will be useless in the long run,... what can their "in vain" mean when the whole existence itself appears "in vain"...  Must absurdity necessarily strike one as depressing? When the conditions of life itself include entropy!, to resonate life at its most dissonant and flare up into a brief meaning at the face of all absurdity, isn't this heroic and at the same time, isn't it absurdity that is laughing at itself? Will the Dionysian deny anything, isn't it rich enough to permit this laughter! Hasn't such a one lived more livelier and fate-fully than anyone else? To such beings that grinned at the sight of ruins, what could their own ruin mean, except theirs is the joy that said, I will even triumph over every joy no matter how good it is; what could the hypothetical self-preserving ever-lasting life mean to them! What sparks of beauty and bravery they were, to touch portions of eternities in life than live eternal durations... it is the intensity that counts, not the duration... and these sparks, might they not set fire to new suns someday...

3. Regarding Schopenhauer, N. called him a "world-denier" and a "morality man" as the former concluded everything in life wishes to avoid death and so, it is better not to be, than to be. N. saw in this stance still the pleasure/pain moral baggage, a lurking eudaimonia, as if pain should be an argument against life, something to flinch, a romantic pessimism.
I think this had more to do with the misunderstanding and corruption of how Buddhism reached the west, starting within India itself. N. was astute and had good instincts to identify the nature of later Buddhism; in short: Buddhism, the result of a rich spirituality become exhausted was not a morality like Xt., but a moral nihilism. That existence was construed as an error and suffering as a punishment becomes a later development of a moral evaluation. He called the second (popular) Buddhism and 'popular' meaning of nirvana - self-extinguishing into a nothingness, a hedonism of the spiritual weary, like Schop.'s suspension of the will. What did N. understand essentially about original Buddhism? That if existence has no inherent meaning, and actions bind one to existence, then all desires that induce one to actions are "evil", i.e. "illogical". Beyond good and evil is thus a Buddhist ideal, and he remarks therefore their first duty was to fight against ressentiment by disengaging without rancor from all reactions. It is this that N. develops further into the ER calling it a "European Buddhism"; the militant spirit of the Dionysian-ER would re-energize where Buddhism had left off in its weariness. The ER was meant to check Resignation of Both the strong as well as the weak natures. If the morality of the weak could be exposed as an immorality, as a will to power, as everything in life is, then the strong and the weak would essentially be brought back to the same plain, same level, and the weak would inevitably have to Fight, having no God-morality to resign in, making enemies of the strong and awakening them. With natural rank-orders falling into place then, the course of evolution could be re-naturalized. Simply put, ER means bringing the weak and the strong together at the same 0 point and making them confront each other by exposing all life is will to power. And If N. became popular among the sheeple, as much as the exceptions, it is because his writings were meant to introduce and provoke aggression in both; the weak resigning in their religion of comfort, and the strong wasting away in self-doubt and moral nihilism.
N. called the essential Buddhism the right attitude, solution and approach to a race that had become weary - the Buddhist desisting from (re)action was meant as a conservative 'temporary' "self-maintenance" till the self could be restored and re-vitalized again. However, it got perverted and typically petrified in a permanent faith-movement. Xt. personified the opp. movmt. - the inability to resist reacting; exhaustion of the underprivileged dregs of society with weak nerves could not resist from reacting to the natural order of life; out of ressentiment, life became evil as a result, etc. N.'s critique of Schop. is owing to this temp. suspension of the will being posited as a morality itself! Imagine N.'s horror for the fate of Germany and Europe and the whole of mankind, as Wagner double compounds Schop.'s romantic buddhism with Xt.!! One has to feel the catastrophe of where things were heading as N. did, which forced him to go about hammering away, using every convincing means to change the tide.  
Point being, N. opined Jud.-Xt. was a disease, and diseases cannot be refuted by reasons. Therefore, as the counter-principle, then even a state of Health cannot be refuted merely by reasons! Imagine someone giving you reasons for why you should not be healthy!! The ER and the Dionysian world view were meant as war-strategies to inject Health back into society. A phil. intending to combat a disease "not through words but through deeds" had to Be Health and Lively and have a Mad In-your-face approach - it was meant not to be combatted by Jud-Xt. "Reasons" - hence his "popularity" even today as they try their best to still shove mud at his face and character calling him gay, schizo, and what not. But it doesn't matter, and N. needs no defence as his work speaks for itself.

Nietzsche wrote:

"What does "underprivileged" mean? Above all, physiologi- cally-no longer politically. The unhealthiest kind of man in Europe (in all classes) furnishes the soil for this nihilism: they will experience the belief in the eternal recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer shrinks from any action; not to be extingnished passively but to extinguish everything that is so aim- and meaning-less, although this is a mere convulsion, a blind rage at the insight that everything has been for eternities-even this moment of nihilism and lust for destruction.- It is the value of such a crisis that it purifies, that it pushes together related elements to perish of each other, that it assigns common tasks to meu who have opposite ways of thinking-and it also brings to light the weaker and less secure among them and thus promotes an order of rank according to strength, from the point of view of health: those who command are recognized as those who command, those who obey as those who obey. Of course, outside every existing social order.

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a con- siderable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes-human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)." [WTP, 55, 1958]

Thanks for your inputs and patience so far.

Some comments, in brief...

Lyssa wrote:

1. Dionysian view: Life is a special case in which everything wants to accumulate force, to add things to itself; it is a striving of power for power.

Correct, as life is not the universe but a rarity and a contradiction of the usual.
Therefore, "Will to Power" only apples to life, not to the universe as a whole.

Lyssa wrote:

When an amoeba or some such with a certain store of force and capacity to act thrusts itself out to be master of its immediate environment, it strives to accumulate more force and assimilate anything in its way, starting with the path of least resistance, essentially striving against anything that resists; and when it does assimilate, it experiences growth, feels nourished, and the slight expenditure of force is experienced as hunger,, and it keeps on seeking more and more things that resist it.

No, an amoeba has no capacity to seek anything but the elements it needs to maintain itself.
It does not seek more resistance as resistance is the norm, since life is a rarity that must conserve itself agaisnt the norm.
The amoeba, conversely, seeks the path-of-least-resistance in that, like the lion, it goes for the resources it requires to maintain itself which are easiest to appropriate. It is only man, or any organism with a higher mind, and his ability to project and to predict and to imagine which is capable of choosing the path-of-more resistance, if not most resistance, so as to gain an advantage over others, against which it competes, or against the natural processes against which it resists.

It is in the course of its struggles to self-preserve than an amoeba, if successful, accumulates the resources to be used towards growth or procreation.

Lyssa wrote:

It is never content with just maintaining itself; this it does -when urged by its primary mode to strive for power, to seek more and more resistances again and again,, never wishing to avoid the displeasure in resistance as evil or a reproach to life. It is an excess and strength of health, an aggressive joy that affirms this displeasure as a stimulus to life.

An amoeba or any form of life which lacks imagination or the ability to project further than the immediate, has no capacity to feel existential angst. All it feels, if you can say that it feels at all, is a driving, insatiable, need which if left unsatisfied results in increasing suffering, one it must continuously feed. This sensation is the sensation of lack; it senses its own existence as that of an absence.

Lyssa wrote:

The Apollonian std. in the weak and impoverished natures that have become decadent, the instincts of what is 'self' become uncertain as the ordering principle is lost or weak, so it starts to moralize and split life as good and evil, pleasure/displeasure, etc. just as the Dionysian in the weak leads to degeneracy of an excess.

The Apollonian does indeed order experiences, knowledge, using dichotomies because this is the only way it can organize anything.
Uncertainty is a result of this lack of absolute knowledge or absolute awareness.

Moralizing is a simple mechanism determined by selfish concerns, at first; later these concerns are projected into grander schemes when the self is identified with an ideal. The organism identifies with an abstraction, such as a nation or a religion and loses itself within it; it is assimilated.
The Apollonian is god striving to Be....Dionysus is the acceptance of the absurdity of this and of its self-destructive nihilism.
Dionysus is Apollo's humility; a reminder that whatever high goals he might have man is condemned to be imperfect, ignorant and mortal....and that this is the only way he could be conscious.

Lyssa wrote:

2. So if we understand in the above, that in the Dionysian world view, everything actively seeks resistances, and pleasure is experienced as an unleashing out and discontent at just self-preservation, wanting more and more resistances against which it can overflow,,, then we understand the Dionysian tragic view of life and the pessimism of strength.

This is ludicrous, for life is by definition a resistance to the norm. It does not have to seek it out for it is part of its condition.
One does not seek out death or decomposition...these come easy.
To live is to be in a constant state of resistance to death, to dying.
This is the very essence of life, experienced as need/suffering/pain. Stength being the higher degree of tolerance to it.
One need not seek out death, for death is easy - it is life, living, which is hard. It is only those who live sheltered lives who think themselves invincible who think the excess of energies they possess is a product of their own doing, rather than the product of a system that allows them the accumualtion of enegies so as to direct it towards productivity.

Lyssa wrote:

Tragedy doesn't mean submission or resignation before the inevitable, but to represent the terrible inevitable in itself is an instinct for power.

Tragedy is the recognition of this fact; it is an awakening to it.
Comedy is the further awakening to the fact that without this tragic state of affairs life, this awareness itself, would be impossible.

To accept this is to accept self.

Lyssa wrote:

To actively seek out the inevitable as a resistance against which It can masterfully overflow is a state of strength.

One seeks more resistance as a way of dealnig with the shortness of time. Mortality forces the mnid that awakens to this reality to seek out faster ways of reaching his/her highest potential before the inevitable comes.

To laugh at the awareness that suffering is not only something to be despised and avoided but it is the very experience of living.

Lyssa wrote:

I think this had more to do with the misunderstanding and corruption of how Buddhism reached the west, starting within India itself. N. was astute and had good instincts to identify the nature of later Buddhism; in short: Buddhism, the result of a rich spirituality become exhausted was not a morality like Xt., but a moral nihilism. That existence was construed as an error and suffering as a punishment becomes a later development of a moral evaluation. He called the second (popular) Buddhism and 'popular' meaning of nirvana - self-extinguishing into a nothingness, a hedonism of the spiritual weary, like Schop.'s suspension of the will. What did N. understand essentially about original Buddhism? That if existence has no inherent meaning, and actions bind one to existence, then all desires that induce one to actions are "evil", i.e. "illogical".

Christianity also claims to be misunderstood...but yes, the absurdity of acting when this acting results in an increase of suffering.
Nirvana promised an end to suffering, essentially an end to all activity or its awareness of itself.

The Hellenes had a different take on asceticism. for them to seek out resistance, stress, suffering, as you say, was a way of increasing one's tolerance of the basic form of natural decline or natural attrition. to lift weights on a 1G earth only helps the organism cope with this consistent pattern of average weight.
It does not result in the ability to deal with a 10G environment.

Lyssa wrote:

Beyond good and evil is thus a Buddhist ideal, and he remarks therefore their first duty was to fight against ressentiment by disengaging without rancor from all reactions.

And this is where its delusion and lie stems from. It claims a slow elimination of activity, but this process itself depends on activity. To be inert, is a myth...one is breathing, one's heart is beating, one is feeding and hydrating continuously....all this is an activity. Life depends on activity, it IS activity. If all is activity, (inter)action, then life is merely the awareness of this. To seek a reduction of it is to seek a reduction of this awareness or a reduction of life.

Lyssa wrote:

Point being, N. opined Jud.-Xt. was a disease, and diseases cannot be refuted by reasons. Therefore, as the counter-principle, then even a state of Health cannot be refuted merely by reasons! Imagine someone giving you reasons for why you should not be healthy!! The ER and the Dionysian world view were meant as war-strategies to inject Health back into society. A phil. intending to combat a disease "not through words but through deeds" had to Be Health and Lively and have a Mad In-your-face approach - it was meant not to be combatted by Jud-Xt. "Reasons" - hence his "popularity" even today as they try their best to still shove mud at his face and character calling him gay, schizo, and what not. But it doesn't matter, and N. needs no defence as his work speaks for itself.

Then you might apreciate my dealings with the sheeple in the manner that I have, thus far, exposing them to the reality of their quality, never caring to inspire or to enlighten or oit deal with them seriuosly.
Maybe you will also appreciate my humble attempt to bring together those who are not sheeple, without really giving a shit if I succeed or not.

Lyssa wrote:

Thanks for your inputs and patience so far.

And thank you for yours.

"Ultimate Will."

"To die thus,
As once I saw him die —
The friend who threw divine thunderbolts and
Glances into my dark youth.
Sportive and profound,
A dancer in the battle —

The most cheerful among warriors,
The gravest among victors,
A fate standing upon his fate,
Hard, reflective, calculating:

Trembling because he triumphed,
Rejoicing in that he triumphed dying:

Commanding while he died —
And he commanded that one destroy ...

To die thus,
As once I saw him die —
Vanquishing, destroying ..." [N.]

[Vgl. Nachlass, KSA 10, 594, Herbst 1883 20[11]:

"This is precisely what the liberating dimension of noon as a standstill is about - it is a perspective on life from life itself, and this perspective is, in itself, liberating. ...That is to say: necessity exists, and things are as they are through necessity; yet this very necessity of things is "what it is" - is such as it is - by accident. Necessity as such is perceived as something that springs from contingency.

And this is the key reason why Nietzsche rejects (and mocks) the notion of free will: what undermines the notion of free will (in its decision-making sense) is not necessity, but contingency - the contingency of/at the very origin of necessity, of what has become
necessity. In a somewhat Nietzschean style, would say that every particular necessity is a "child" of contingency. Contingency is what one cannot master with one's "free will". Yet if one cannot master contingency, one can embrace and affirm it. In embracing it, one inevitably embraces two things at the same time: the thing that has occured (as necessary) through contingency, and this contingency itself. Or, even more precisely, in embracing
contingency, one also embraces necessity. This argument leads us back to the theme of double
affirmation. When Nietzsche keeps repeating that man still has to "learn how to will" ("to reject all halfhearted willing" and "to be able to will"), this is what he is getting at: man has to comprehend the will (or wanting) as something that is always double or redoubled. If one really wants a thing, one also wantsthe chance that brought this thing about; and vice-versa: if one wants contingency, one also wants the thing that this contingency has brought about (as
necessary). If not, the willing itself is crippled, plunged into the "spirit of revenge and gnashing of teeth."

In Zarathustra, Nietzsche formulates this double dimension of willing in terms of the will being able also to will backward. "All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident - until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I willed it.'" This Nietzschean theme is sometimes (mis)understood as a form of volunteeristic appropriation or abolishment of necessity (and of the contingency at its origin): whatever happens is retroactively posited as something
we wanted. Yet this would simply be what Nietzsche calls "concealing the necessity" (out of vanity), and is quite different from loving what is necessary. When Zarathustra says that his will can dominate chance, this in no way implies that the will changes chance into something else , something that was brought about by our will. On the contrary, will can dminate or
"diarm" chance precisely and simply by wanting as chance. In tjis sense, "willing backward" is nothing but affirming (saying "Yes" to) what one might call "contingent necessity" (or, alternatively, the unavoidable necessity of contingency itself)." [Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow]

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"It is my thesis that Nishida, by insisting on a 'contradictory identity', has embraced the very 'object logic' abandoned by the Buddhists as well as by modern Western philosophers such as Nietzsche, James and Derrida. Nishida insists that he is attempting to create a concrete logic. To be truly concrete, however, Nishida cannot describe experience in the abstract, or in terms of abstract logical categories. Nishida's approach, nevertheless, moves away from the phenomenological towards logical abstraction, and, in so doing, this methodology moves him away from his own stated objectives. The irony is that Western figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, James and Derrida have tried to develop a methodology to attain what, in effect, Nishida calls a 'logic of the East' by abandoning the very categories that Nishida resurrects from more traditional Western philosophy.

Heraclitus was well aware of this difficulty which he expressed with the paradox: "Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not". Clearly, Heraclitus admitted a continuity of change.

Heraclitus also applies this paradox to personal identity as well: we "both are and are not".

Paramenides' theory of Being was entirely derived from the logic of the excluded middle, imposed on the world at the expense of experience.

That our experience includes change as well as diversity, was recognised by Plato and Aristotle. Yet both Plato and Aristotle were convinced that Parmenides' conception of Being, as eternal and unchanging, must be true, at least at the most basic level. They were convinced that, in the change of any material thing there is something essential which remains the same and something non-essential which changes. Plato attempted to resolve this issue by applying Heraclitus' theory of flux to the phenomenal world, and Parmenides' unchanging Being to the reality behind the phenomenal world, the reality which gives order and meaning to change, and from which change derives. This reality which informs change he called the world of 'Forms' or 'Ideas' (eidos).

Aristotle, uncomfortable with the idea of Forms as independent existents, thought that nothing could exist apart from concrete individuals. The particular individual, the concrete being, is the result of the immanent, or indwelling Form (eidos) giving shape to the 'matter' (hyle), since Form without matter has no substance, and substance without form has no qualities. The true 'primary being' is the concrete individual. It is in the concrete individual that changes of qualities occur, since neither the Form nor the matter are themselves produced. Thus, for Aristotle, the concrete individual exists in a state of a flux of qualities, but within the individual is the matter which acts as the substrate, and as long as the individual is what it is, a particular kind of something, its essence, its definition remains constant. For 'what is passing away must still have something of what has passed away; and of what is coming to be, something must already be'. Thus, Aristotle's substrate which provides for continuity of change includes the matter and its immanent Form.

Nishida was critical of Aristotle's theory of the individual as primary substance (proto ousia). For Nishida, the substrate, or the 'that in which' change occurs, was itself changing.

Nishida argued that as long as the universal, the general, that by which a thing can be known, is unchanging, "change, or action cannot arise from it". Causality must be operative in both directions: the universal on the particular and the particular on the universal: nature on the particular and the particular on nature. The 'individual thing' as the 'active self' was, for Nishida, "the ultimate point of determination of the universal". The active self "lives by dying". It "is a continuity of a discontinuity". It "destroys the present ... in the process of changing it".

Thus, Nishida finds much in common with Heraclitus. Although the logos is that which is "common to all". Heraclitus never commits himself to an ontological unchanging essence as a substrate for change. The universe itself, for Heraclitus, is ever changing, "an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures". Even the soul is in "ceaseless flux".

For both Nishida and Heraclitus, a logic that requires strict equivalence cannot be applied to relations of a temporal entity with itself at different times. We cannot truly say that 'Being A' at t[1] is identical to 'Being A' at t[2] nor can we truly say that 'Being A' at t[1] is not identical to 'Being A' at t[2]. As Philip Wheelwright has noted, for Heraclitus, "Nothing is exclusively this or that ... Paradox lies inextricably at the very heart of reality." The river is "always becoming other than what it is at any given moment". It is the 'same' and yet not the 'same'. "A paradoxical utterance," he argues, "announces that ... two contrary processes [creation and destruction] are both going on all the time, and that their continual and varying tension is what makes existence and life possible". This notion of process is basic to what Nishida terms 'contradictory identity'.

The particulars give rise to the whole and the whole to the particulars: the universe evolves through the interplay of particulars and totality. Of special interest to our study of Nishida is Heraclitus's theory of opposites as expressed in the following fragments:

The harmony of the world is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, plenty and want. But he [God] is changed, just as when incense is mingled with incense, but named according to the pleasure of each.

In the first fragment, it is precisely through the opposition of opposites that harmony is attained. In the second fragment, each member of a pair of opposites has meaning in relation to its counterpart and in relation to 'God', presumably here the totality of all changes. These relationships are all in constant flux, the objects, as well as God. If we try to interpret

Nishida's 'contradictory identity', where something is what it is and yet is more than what it is. But, note that this 'identity' can only be contradictory from the point of view of the logic or 'either/or', what Nishida calls 'object logic', when logical contradictories are applied uncritically to the world. For Heraclitus and Nishida, the individual is neither an atomic being existing independently from the rest of nature, not is that individual the totality of nature. It is a confusion to maintain that a particular individual is either separate from or identical with the remainder of nature.

The Identity of the Self:

A foundational concept for Nishida's philosophy was the Mahayana Buddhist concept of 'Absolute Nothingness' (zettai mu).

Two of the most basic of Buddhist teachings are the doctrines of 'impermanence' (anitya) and 'no-self' (anatman). According to the doctrine of 'impermanence' nothing is found in experience that does not change, that does not pass away; nor is there any such entity posited beyond experience. According to the doctrine of 'no-self', there is no abiding, permanent self, soul, or essence (atman) in objects, living or otherwise, found in experience. And, here also, there is no such entity determined to exist merely through reason, or based on some authority.

The only meaningful notion of the 'self', for the Buddha, was the aggregate which he called the 'psycho-physical personality' (nama-rupa). This aggregate is composed of five interacting sub-aggregates: the body (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (samjna), encrusted mental and personality habits and volitions (samskaras), and consciousness (vijnana).

Nishida denies the existence of an unchanging, permanent, and essential self. Indeed, he partially develops the traditional Buddhist doctrine that a search for such self is fruitless: "In the depths of our selves there is nothing to be found; everywhere is 'nothingness'.

Nishida instead advocates a continuity of discontinuity, a continuity of momentary conscious selves, self-created anew as a unique entity from moment to moment:

The true individual arises as a momentary self-determination of the absolute present.

'Momentary self-determination' consists in the act of consciously creating the 'self, both as a unique temporal being and as a being 'expressing' the world in itself.

That we are consciously active means that we mould the world by expressing it in terms of our [individual] selves within ourselves. This means that the world is necessarily subjectivized in our individual 'selves'.

Nishida derives much of this imagery from Leibniz. In a specific reference to Leibniz Nishida writes:

As in the Monadology, each monad expresses the world and simultaneously is an originating point of the world's self-expression.

This is a development of Leibniz's thesis that each monad expresses the whole universe from its own point of view as we see clearly in the following passage by Nishida:

What is the nature of the existence of the self of conscious activity? The existence of the self is [found] in the fashioning of the self through self-expression. This includes the self-expression of the world within the [particular] self of each individual. It is the determination of the world of contradictory identity through self-expression.

He diverges from Leibniz by stressing 'self-expression' as a creative act "without an underlying substance or ground". It is a "transformation from the created to the creating".

There is nothing at all that determines the self at the very ground of the self. If there is nothing instinctive in the direction of the grammatical subject, there is nothing rational in the direction of the predicate. The self is ultimately groundless.

He diverges from Leibniz by stressing 'self-expression' as a creative act "without an underlying substance or ground". It is a "transformation from the created to the creating".

There is nothing at all that determines the self at the very ground of the self. If there is nothing instinctive in the direction of the grammatical subject, there is nothing rational in the direction of the predicate. The self is ultimately groundless.

Here, Nishida is advocating a form of 'absolute freedom', where "in its own bottomlessly immanent depths the self never finds itself'. The self is not bound by instinct arising from its nature as object, a product of the world, nor by reason arising through universals or forms, which allow us to rationally understand the world.

Paradoxically, however, this 'groundless self, this 'determination of the self as a 'focal point of the world' becomes the focus of the absolute present which includes within itself the eternal past and the eternal future". The entire universe, past, present and future, in effect, infinitely creates itself through an infinity of individual focal centres originating in unique monadic selves, all within an infinite circle, "where every point, every act of consciousness, is a center radiating in infinity".

Here, Nishida seems to anticipate Whitehead's notion of 'contrescence', which is defined as the process by which "the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively".

For Nishida, as we have already noted, "there is nothing at all that determines the self at the very ground of the self.

For Nishida, the thesis that monadic selves are determined through necessity is a form of 'object logic', according to which past events (or objects) are conceived as separate 'entities' from future events (or objects) and that future events are determined by past events, through a form of external causation. Events (or objects) thus become mere passive recipients of causal efficacy.

Whitehead has pointed out that the variety of metaphysical systems arises out of the process of abstraction, which he defines as transcending "particular concrete occasions of actual happening". Abstractions, therefore, run the risk of emphasising certain aspects of reality at the expense of others and thus of provoking the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". This is because: "No entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe"; and "paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities". Whitehead, of course, did not conclude from this that abstraction is a thing to be avoided at all cost. Quite to the contrary, it cannot be avoided, but great care must be taken that our abstractions are not "overstated" and "exaggerated" and that we do not ignore vital aspects of the "actualities" under our analysis.

Nishida shows an awareness of this danger when he says:

I call this seeing by becoming things and hearing by becoming things. What must be negated is the dogmatism of the [reified] self, conceived abstractly. What must be decisively repudiated is the attachment to the self conceived of objectively. The more the self becomes religious, the more it must forget itself while exhausting reason and emotion. But to imprison the self in any determinate form is the corruption of religion. Dogmas are like a knife that severs our life's root.

Whitehead has pointed out that the variety of metaphysical systems arises out of the process of abstraction, which he defines as transcending "particular concrete occasions of actual happening". Abstractions, therefore, run the risk of emphasising certain aspects of reality at the expense of others and thus of provoking the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". This is because: "No entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe"; and "paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities". Whitehead, of course, did not conclude from this that abstraction is a thing to be avoided at all cost. Quite to the contrary, it cannot be avoided, but great care must be taken that our abstractions are not "overstated" and "exaggerated" and that we do not ignore vital aspects of the "actualities" under our analysis.

Nishida shows an awareness of this danger when he says:

I call this seeing by becoming things and hearing by becoming things. What must be negated is the dogmatism of the [reified] self, conceived abstractly. What must be decisively repudiated is the attachment to the self conceived of objectively. The more the self becomes religious, the more it must forget itself while exhausting reason and emotion. But to imprison the self in any determinate form is the corruption of religion. Dogmas are like a knife that severs our life's root.

Indeed, Nishida himself argues that the original intuition of the individual, by necessity, cannot be said, known, or defined. In this case, it would seem fallacious to define the extent, or range, of an ineffable intuition, and to use such concepts to define the nature of the 'self'.

Also, how can we describe temporal moments in monadic terms when we experience time as a continuum? How can we speak meaningfully about the 'contradictory identity' of the 'totality' and a 'monadic self' (even as a stage in a dialectical logic), when these are metaphysically abstracted from experience? We may be alternately denying and affirming chimeras of the imagination.

However, Nishida might respond that his philosophy cannot be understood merely as an abstraction, rather, his philosophy is an attempt to express his own philosophical and religious experience by pointing the way. Let us examine his work in a phenomenological light, concentrating on what he calls 'enlightenment' (kensho), which he says means to "penetrate in to the depths of our 'selves', ... to penetrate to the depths of [the selfs] 'contradictory identity'".

Nishida uses language to point to the experience of the "conscious act". But, does the experience of consciousness really point to a "contradictory self'? Certainly we often tend to conceive the world in a dichotomous fashion: as self vs other, here vs there. We distinguish acting upon some thing from being acted upon by something. We view the temporal self sometimes as different through time, sometimes as being essentially identical. We conceive ourselves sometimes as individuals, distinct from the world, and sometimes as part of the totality of the world. But these are not experienced as contradictions; these are, rather, a plurality of experiences. They only become contradictions when abstracted from experience, placed together as objects, and described as metaphysical dichotomies.

A cell in the body, for example, is both a whole and a part. This is not a contradiction. The cell is a whole in the sense that it is a biological system or structure, and it is a part in that the body is a larger biological system composed of cells. The same thing can be said of the body in relation to the biosphere of the world. There are no arbitrary lines which absolutely separate self as whole and self as part. There can only be a contradiction if we confuse the perspectives, and insist that something is a whole and a part from the same perspective.

For Nishida, however, each individual is fully and creatively individual and fully an expression of the universe. This logic is certainly contradictory, but in order to arrive at the contradiction we need to use the very kind of logic which Nishida rejects: 'object' logic.

Certainly we might point to a causality arising from our selves as an individual system and to a causality arising from its interaction with our environment. These causal configurations interact, and sometimes might seem to be acting at cross purposes. But this does not constitute a contradiction or a paradox. We might argue that we are forming our selves and being formed by our environment, but there is again no contradiction involved here because these two causalities are not mutually exclusive.

Nishida, on the other hand, cannot argue that the experience of 'contradictory identity' is a higher order consciousness because he insists that:

When I speak of religion, I do not refer to a special kind of consciousness.

Indeed, no meditation master, whether Buddhist or Hindu has ever maintained that the experience of contradiction is part of meditation. It is precisely this kind of philosophical abstraction that meditation is meant to avoid.

Quoting the Chan (Zen) Master, Nan-Ch'Ban (Jap. Nanzen), Nishida maintains that "ordinary mind is the way". Moreover:

In every respect we penetrate to the depths of this 'ordinary mind' ...
Therefore, Nan-ch'Ban has said that, "[Even] to aim for [the Way] is go astray".

This insistence on 'ordinary mind' invites the objection that 'absolute negation' does not correspond to any 'ordinary' experience. Quite to the contrary, it is an attempt through abstraction to project two different perspectives simultaneously. It is only through such effort that I conceive the two perspectives as being contradictory. But this conception does not arise out of a direct experience of self or of things. It requires a distinct effort to maintain such a conception, which immediately vanishes as soon as mental or physical action begins. The whole attempt is an artificial method of seeking the way, not of seeing the way as it is, or has become. Thus, in spite of Nishida's emphasis on the 'acting person', the philosophy of 'ordinary mind' seems to lead in precisely the opposite direction from Nishida's logic of absolute contradiction, which requires us to abstract from experience a logical dichotomy and then to apply a transcendental logic in order to reunify the dichotomy into a unity.

In this vein, Nishida also makes repeated appeal to the famous teaching of Dogen in his fascicle Shobogenzo Genjo Koan:

To study the way of Buddha is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self.

"This", according to Nishida, represents "a point of view that is completely opposed to viewing things through object logic."

That Dogen's position includes a critique of what Nishida calls 'object logic' in the grand tradition of Nagarjuna is clear, but there is no hint that Dogen uses a transcendental logic of 'contradictory identity'. Instead, rather than simultaneously holding two opposing points of view, Dogen is using a 'progressive definition'; he is after a shift in our point of view: an ever deepening insight. Let us examine the passage from Dogen in more detail:

To study the Way of the Buddhas
Is to study the self;
To study the self
Is to forget the self;
To forget the self
Is to witness the myriad dharmas;
And to witness the myriad dharmas
Is to drop off the body-mind
Of both self and other.
It is the ceasing
Of all traces of enlightenment
This vanished and traceless enlightenment
Advances ever onward.

To study the true nature of the self, for Dogen, is to realise that the self is empty of all substantiality and atomic separateness, and in so doing directly to experience the world, or the "ten thousand dharmas". To experience the world means to 'drop off' (datsuraku), or to 'let go' the psychophysical personalities (shinjin) of both 'self' and 'other'. Here, Dogen abandons the dichotomy of self and other, rather than embrace it. It is precisely at this point where Nishida creates the 'contradiction' by accepting both 'self and 'other'.

It is for this very reason that we read in the Heart Sutra (Prajna-paramita-Hrdaya-Sutra), where an absolute distinction between 'form' (rupa) and 'emptiness' (sunyata) is denied:

Here, O Sariputra, form is emptiness and emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, dispositions and consciousness.

Nagarjuna made this same point by defining 'emptiness' in terms of 'dependent arising':

We state that whatever is dependent arising, that is emptiness. That is dependent upon convention. That itself is the middle path.

Thus, Dogen, instead of accepting both absolute non-being, rejects this dichotomy, saying poetically that the Way of the Buddhas transcends these conceptions. Thus, in a concrete sense there is 'generation and extinction', 'delusion and enlightenment' and 'sentient being and buddhas'. But Dogen goes beyond mere affirmation; he moves to an existential description of the human condition: that of the experience of suffering in a transient world.

I argue that Nishida's emphasis on a logic of 'contradictory identity', in spite of his intentions, functions as a complex system of abstractions which tend to defeat themselves. They cannot operate as a phenomenological description of ordinary experience, and they are not effective in pointing the way to any religious realisation--due to their overly abstract nature and their extreme complexity they tend to focus the attention of the reader away from experience.

Furthermore, it cannot be argued that Nishida does not intend, on a basic level, a phenomenological description of experience and of the self, since the conception of 'place' (basho) would then be meaningless. Even though Nishida abandoned his emphasis on 'pure experience' (junsui keiken), his logic of the place of Nothingness (mu no basho) was meant to provide a less restrictive understanding of the nature of the self, and the selfs experience of the world in terms of both the effect of the world on the person and the person's creative effect on the world. Thus, we can only conclude that Nishida's emphasis on logical categories, at the expense of experience, has needlessly obscured his theory of place, or field, (basho)..."