All posts by anomalogue

Antithetical compassions: pity vs. joying-with

Philosophy

It is impossible to understand Nietzsche’s attitude toward pity if you don’t understand his counter-ideal: joying-with.It is tempting to interpret all of Nietzsche’s affirmations of aggression, hostility, and devil’s advocacy as Nietzsche’s affirmations of his own highest ideals – as a complement to his own pitilessness. I see his presentation of evil as both necessary and, from a certain altitude, as a form of good (or from a certain depth, pre-good) as “justice with open eyes”, a redemption of evil. His renunciation of pity is not indifference to the pain of others, but rather a refusal to indulge in the expedient of keeping another company in misery, and increasing the amount of misery in the world.Some passages:

Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.

*

The first thought of the day. – The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

*

The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals, and among them it is accessible only to the choicest exemplars: thus a rare humanum: so that there have been philosophers who have denied the existence of joying with.

*

… And, although I will keep quiet here about some things, I do not wish to keep quiet about my morality, which tells me: Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today! And let the clamour of today, the noise of war and revolutions, be but a murmur to you. You will also want to help but only those whose distress you properly understand because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the way you help yourself. I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, more full of gaiety. I want to teach them what is today understood by so few least of all by these preachers of compassion: to share not pain, but joy!

 

Nietzsche is one of the most benevolent and morally expansive men who ever lived, and if you read him with that understanding, he reads very differently. The experience will persuade and change you.

“Abraham”

Philosophy

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir

Acknowledging the thouness of the Other

Philosophy

According to Wikipedia “shalom” means the same thing as “namaste”.

*

Ram Dass on namaste: “I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.”

*

The idea of upaya as Noble Lie – a reality-distorting lie – is diabolical. It despises the thouness of the Other.

True upaya is mytho-poetic truth that permits the understanding of the the most profoundly meaningful words to degrade gracefully in the ears of the hearer, to simplify without falsification. Within upaya the most sophisticated and the least sophisticated can speak with one another and agree to the furthest extent, and the agreement can continuously grow together within the shared forms of the community. Upaya is the spine of community that connects crown and vestigial tail.

 *

If I were to discover that Nietzsche disagrees with me on this point, I would have to reverently reject him.

De-romanticizing religion

Philosophy

I am out to de-romanticize religion, but not in order to explain it out of existence. I de-romanticize religion so it can pervade ordinary life and consecrate it.

*

Romanticism externalizes and reveres what ought to be desired, pursued, penetrated and internalized. It worships when what is most needful is love. Romanticism’s style is to reject with enthusiastic pseudo-acceptance. It loves only masks of its own creation.

Out of context

Ideas

The difference between innocence and guilt is a matter of urgency. How much time is there to judge?

In crises – on the battlefield, in a catastrophe, or even under the pressure of a tight deadline – judgment is dispensed quickly and cursorily. (“Analysis paralysis! We don’t have time to philosophize!”) In peace judgment is slower and deeper.

*

Three men were condemned in court, each for a statement he had made which had been taken out of context and used as evidence against him.

The first man would have been absolved by the sentence preceding and the sentence following his statement. The second man would have been released had the full transcript of his speech been made available with a brief explanation of his situation. The third man also would have been exonerated had the courts heard and understood his full speech, knew his biography and had learned to see his situation as he saw it – but this would have taken months or years of close and honest study. In other words, the third man really was guilty.

*

Some people prefer urgency precisely because urgency leaves no time to think. One must leap straight to the conclusion, ostensibly in order to “act decisively”. In some cases, though, the need for immediate action is a semi-conscious ruse. The possibility that the situation could be different from how it appears at first glance arouses instinctive anxiety in the “man of action”. This anxiety is discharged in attacking dissent and lunging into reaction. From there doubts are dispelled by the distractions of events.

However, urgency is real, the need to act is real, and guilt is real. The question is: Real in what sense? This kind of question deservedly arouses the most cynical skepticism. “God is real… but in what sense?” “What is… is?”

*

The declining world-view loves an emergency; but the dying world-view is dependent on emergencies and expends its last strength creating them.

Some wars are only the death-spasms of a world-view.

The noble traitor

Hermeneutics

From Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human:

Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets these rigidify into convictions. — However, if one feels he is of a free, restlessly alive spirit, he can prevent this rigidity through constant change; and if he is on the whole a veritable thinking snowball, then he will have no opinions at all in his head, but rather only certainties and precisely calculated probabilities. – But we who are of a mixed nature, sometimes aglow with fire and sometimes chilled by the spirit, we want to kneel down before justice, as the only goddess whom we recognize above us. Usually the fire in us makes us unjust, and in the sense of that goddess, impure; never may we grasp her hand in this condition; never will the grave smile of her pleasure lie upon us. We revere her as the veiled Isis of our lives; ashamed, we offer her our pain as a penance and a sacrifice, whenever the fire burns us and tries to consume us. It is the spirit that saves us from turning utterly to burnt-out coals; here and there it pulls us away from justice’s sacrificial altar, or wraps us in an asbestos cocoon. Redeemed from the fire, we then stride on, driven by the spirit, from opinion to opinion, through the change of sides, as noble traitors to all things that can ever be betrayed – and yet with no feeling of guilt.

I’ve read this passage a hundred times and it is never the same. A change in the whole of my understanding transfigures each particular insight, but whenever an insight is transfigured the whole is transfigured, too. This is the hermeneutic circle, the mandala, the wheel of Samsara… The illusion of the world is not “the world” but that there is an objective absolute. (The irony is that seeing the world as an illusion making a truer objective world is to fall even more deeply into the illusion.) There is only a true flux, and an enworlding, and infinite possibilities of alternative enworldings: practical, experienced transcendence.

*

Humans are happy in a young, freshly-enworlded world.

*

The conservatives are (were?) right in that we do need a world to be human. By “need a world” I mean we do need an ethos, we do need an ethic that perpetuates the ethos and we do need those particular beliefs which arise naturally and self-evidently from a coherent way of living and give some form to the phenomenal flux we are all thrown into at birth. However conservatives are wrong to think there is only one legitimate world – a world which we betrayed, lost and can recover only by reversing the clock and building backwards, from willful “faith” in particular beliefs (as if we really decide positively what we believe?), to a logical, systematic response to these beliefs in the form of a codified ethic, and finally to some sort of promised land earned by this effort, paid out to each of us after our biological death. This is not religious thought, and it is time we reject this view of religion: Fundamentalism is half-science. It accepts the constrictions of science (objectivity as the sole form of truth), but rejects science’s redeeming skeptical discipline. This discipline is what allows science to stay within its proper bounds and to relate civilly within philosophy’s more comprehensive understanding (which understands objectivity in relation to practice and meaning). Fundamentalism thinks it looks back at the past, but it looks back with blind modern eyes. It pretends to affirm the past; but its animus is the negation of the present.

Until recently, liberalism saw “world” as a threat to freedom. Each individual had her own perspective of things, her own meaning, her own ethic (preferably not codified) and her “own truth”. Who was to say finally what was the truth and what was not? The extent of the agreement: let’s agree to disagree, pleasantly, peacefully. Live and let live. Judge not.

Did liberalism take its skepticism far enough, though? If there is no ultimately determinable foundational objective truth does it follow that truth has no value? What happens when you become skeptical toward skepticism?

*

Is a world really founded on objectivity? The ancient Indians and the ancient Chinese believed the opposite. The world as we have it is only the result of a downward movement from above, manifesting as a holistic vision of life, then into a moral-practical response to that holistic vision (either spontaneous or imposed), and finally the meaning and practice condenses into things, facts, formulas, words, images – the objects of our lives. (The Triad: Heaven-Man-Earth.)

Does the Judeo-Christian tradition really see things differently? Consider the myth of the Tower of Babel versus the image of the New Jerusalem being lowered from the heavens related in the poetic vision of Revelation. Also, the Garden of Eden myth: mankind chose to objective knowledge of good and evil over the simpler Edenic being-in state of divine participation. They were immediately seized with the “self”-consciousness of the seen (the yin), veiled their nakedness with clothes, and, when confronted with their choice, they consummated the choice by hiding behind objects, blame and explanations.

If I am wrong, at least I am wrong interestingly. If you have been bored and if you think sanity might be over-rated: why not entertain a little interesting insanity?

*

As a designer, I accept the requirements of what I will design – but I do not accept the first-glance implications of the requirements. To immediately set to work systematizing before one has looked at the meaningful possibilities – that’s the reflex of project management – it is both expedient and predictable – but it leads to dull competence. To involve others in exploring meaningful possibilities is to think beyond one’s own horizons, to converse in the grandest style which does involve anxiety and suffering. It means epoche – suspension of determinate details – vagueness (a.k.a. bullshit) – or if you prefer: hope… love of collaboration… genuine inclusion… faith in dialogue.

“On the Tree on the Mountainside”

Philosophy

I read “On the Tree on the Mountainside” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra both yesterday and today, and it inspired me to add a lot of crazy stuff to yesterday’s “Mottos” post as well as some better-than-average cross-referencing on my wiki.

Beyond collective narcissism

Ideas

The Democrats in nominating Obama transcended the familiar and put its faith in the radical Other.

“Radical Other”: This means Obama is unknowable on principle to the average Democrat. He is fascinating precisely because (for most for now ) it is qualitatively impossible to imagine how the world looks from his eyes. It is obvious from his words and bearing that his vision is a good vision. Obama’s infamous vagueness seems to me to be refusal to pre-determine the outcome of a conversation that has not yet taken place; his hope is faith that the fusion of horizons arising from dialogue between antithetical perspectives can result in a deeper, more comprehensive, more inclusive, more nourishing national vision.

If the Democrats had nominated Hillary it would have continued an old narcissistic pattern that sunk the party again and again. “Give me the epitome of what I can comprehend: myself. That is, give me a competent administrator.” Skillful administrators are necessary and good, but even the most excellent administrators tend to ground themselves in a vision. The national vision is precisely what has been in question. With the nomination of Obama this pattern was broken: the Democrats finally adored beyond themselves and elected a true leader.

Meanwhile look what happened in the lower-order right, the Republican mob. Since Neoconservatism – (a movement with Troskyist roots, which “turned conservative” only in the 60s as a reaction against Stalinism) – gained full control of the party the Republicans have been hard at work employing the demagogic tricks of the left, namely disingenuously condescending to and flattering the masses, pretending to be “of the people”. The Cheney upper-Right Republicans taught the lower-Right to adore only its own self-image and to hate everything that does not conform to it. Essentially, they’ve taught those with the most crippled judgment to exalt its own style of “no-brainer”, self-evident, common sense, and to reject as the “wise man’s foolishness” whatever can’t be processed and packaged into a sound-bite…

Philosophical mottos

Philosophy

Nothing bears scrutiny. Love disarms scrutiny.

*

Feeling the Why is certainty of rootedness. Knowing the Why is the poetic condensation of this certainty. But asking “Why?”: this is also a kind of certainty.

*

(As I use it): Love is spontaneous (non-rational) valuing. Love is manifested as spontaneous (uninterpreted) seeing-as-beautiful, or acceptance of being-seen-as-beautiful.

*

Both the pure eye and the evil eye wish to see persuasively.

*

To be human is to see-with. To lead is to see persuasively.

To philosophize is to see experimentally. Infrequently, the experiment ends well. That is the experimentation yields a vision: a more thorough, affirming, inclusive, accessible and practicable seeing-with.

*

When we can look out onto the world and see it as beautiful, with nothing offensive remaining, refusing to look closer is the right thing to do. There is nothing virtuous about strip-mining a pristine landscape, whether man-made or natural. Stop courageously at the surface.

*

The intellectual conscience is obligated to confront the problems that come to it; but just as much, it is obligated to refrain from confronting problems that have not come to it. The intellectual conscience should resist the temptation to advance into foreign problems when its borders have been secured. However, minds and armies are only human, and the best defense becomes a restless offense. Peace dies of boredom.

*

Conservatism at its best preserves the conditions for transcendence. Conservatism at its worst prohibits all change, most of all transcendence. But even the worst conservatism does its good work, it just plays a very different role from the one it thinks it plays.

(To put it differently, “Vishnu” without Shiva is not Vishnu, even if it does Vishnu’s work; and the converse is also true: “Shiva” without Vishnu is not Shiva, even when it does Shiva’s work. Gods have self-awareness or they’re still a brood of conflicting instincts slithering blindly toward retroactive divinity.)

*

Sympathize up; empathize down.

Heaven covers, earth supports

Philosophy

I keep editing my post from yesterday on reading hexagrams.

Today I’m playing with a paradox: Understanding belongs not to earth which underlies, but to heaven which is over and which comprehensively covers. Comprehension belongs not to heaven which holds all truth together (com-prehends) within its overarching totality, but to earth which underlies.

Maybe understanding is what the mind stands under, not what stands under the mind as its foundation. Comprehension is the orientation toward what can be comprehended: what stands whole for us against a background.

*

Hitting a worn-out theme of mine again: Youthful love is a grasping and possessing of another. Mature love is sharing understanding within which things are grasped.

Jealously is legitimate, but not as an expression of greed. Jealously is the threat of destruction of sharedness of vision, of being. Under the influence of an alien influence, the loved one changes perspectives and no longer sees-with. The shared being is destroyed, and the betrayed becomes, in respect to the shared being, a severed part. The betrayed participates in death.

*

The people who have bothered me most are the ones who think that seeing with me is incidental to friendship. I’ve known people who thought they could know me intimately and matter in my life while actively fleeing or stonewalling my “influence”. They wanted to preserve their individuality! – but what could be less original than to adopt uncritically and unconsciously this all-too-common attitude toward influence and individuality?

What was desired was not actually to escape influence and to preserve individuality, but to escape the appearance of influence from any one other individual. The former is pride; the latter, vanity. (That autism vs. borderline theme again – excessive yang vs excessive yin… honor is androgynous.)

*

I’ve been reading Octavio Paz’s The Bow and the Lyre. It’s not hard to see from the title how this harmonizes with Taoism.

Reading hexagrams

Taoism

I am still working on being able to read a trigram or hexagram like a sentence. A sentence, of course, is not an aggregate of words, but a sequential whole developed through the inter-illumination of the parts. The I Ching is a typology of 4,096 situations, each situated between past and future situations. I’d also like to learn to read any situation as a hexagram.

*

Heaven yao: meaning
Yang understanding – stable: unity; changing: discord
Yin understanding – stable: dividedness; changing: attunement

Man yao: practice
Yang action – stable: participation; changing: doubt
Yin action – stable: reflection; changing: experiment

Earth yao: theory
Yang comprehension – stable: system; changing: inconsistency
Yin comprehension – stable: flux; changing: hypothesis

*

A hexagram is a stack of two trigrams. Reading from bottom to top, it goes earth-man-heaven, earth-man-heaven. However, it can also be read earth-earth, man-man, heaven-heaven. (I enjoy relating these two interpretative rhythms to the simplest form of the Bulerias rhythm: 1-2-3, 1-2-3 / 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Here’s a more complex variant  to listen to if you like flamenco, or perhaps a less complicated bastardization will do.)

My current understanding is that a hexagram represents a situation in terms of a perspectival duality: the lower trigram representing the part regarding the whole, and the upper trigram representing the whole regarding the part. In respect to the lower trigram, the upper trigram is transcendent, and merely intuited. What appears to fall cleanly within a perspective – objects – can be comprehended. What is itself comprehended by a containing perspective is aware of this containment by way of intuition. The intuition situates the contained subject within the larger subjectivity.

(Note, however, that this vision is a deep prejudice of mine, and I don’t prevent it from overpowering and subsuming other views. An example of this way of seeing: I do not believe two people negotiate directly with one another. Each negotiates with a subjectivity they share, and it only appears that the negotiation is between two parallel entities, one person with another. Being nests. The negotiation is between comprehension and transcendence.)

*

This is not exactly on topic, but it’s close enough to include here. My boss said something in a meeting last week that struck me: “Unity, not uniformity.”

Finished

Biography, Philosophy

I’ve finished Beyond Good and Evil again, and as always it was a new book.

I’ve been furiously thematizing and cross-referencing. Some of the more interesting threads of thought:

*

Nietzsche’s last book, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, was just a bunch of inter-illuminating passages selected from older works sequenced to create a portrait of Wagner as the epitome of the late romantic. My blog and wiki follow this method.

Greek to Chinese

Taoism

Dionysus
—o—
Changing yang
Order to primordial flux
Intoxication

Apollo
— x —
Changing yin
Primordial flux to order
Dream

*

Pure yin: Borderline personality.

Pure yang: Autistic personality.

*

Epicureanism: Protection of fledgling order. The edge of changing yin. The cradle.

Tragedy: Unconditional faith in the interchange: receptive, active, sacrificial, creative participation in the movement. The edge of changing yang.

The Ass-Kicking Woman

Philosophy

As far as I can tell the male American world now divides into two parties: those with crushes on Sarah Palin versus those with crushes on Tina Fey.

What makes this spectacle especially fascinating is its hall-of-mirrors quality. Superficially, it appears that Tina Fey’s popularity is derived from Sarah Palin’s. Tina Fey rose to her current peak with her uncanny Palin imitation. However, if you look more closely into who the two women essentially are, ambiguity sets in and one has to ask who is imitating what?

Clearly the symbol language around Sarah Palin – the moose hunting pitbull in lipstick – evokes an emerging archetype I’ve been calling the Ass-Kicking Woman: the woman who uses force and charm together in such a way that people do exactly what she wants in full knowledge that they are doing exactly what she wants… and they would have it no other way. (This is the ideal by which I am raising my daughters.)

However, is this essentially who Sarah Palin is, or is she simply playing games with disguises? Isn’t she just obediently following a fashion set by the left (similar to the past fashions of civil rights and environmentalism), mothballing her brass buttons and navy broadcloth and dressing up her complacent self in daring wolfskins? And what’s under those wolfskins? Wow, look: an essentially submissive, sheep-like attitude toward a thoroughly obsolete retro 20th Century paradigm which sees resolutions of conflict only in the good guys annihilating or dominating the bad guys… Wolfskin under sheepskin under wolfskin…

Tina Fey, on the other hand uses a mixture of satire and charm to advance what appears to be her own causes, using costumes to expose the costuming of her ludicrous counterpart. In a very real way, then, couldn’t it be said that it is Sarah Palin who is imitating Tina Fey? Essences who plays games with surface as exercise of essence. It’s almost as if artificiality is its nature. What is this?

These are interesting questions, but in the end there’s a much more interesting question to contemplate: The whole world agrees that the Ass-Kicking Woman is compelling, or, to put it in plainer language: she’s hot.

And check it out! The catsuit of this Halloween: dressing up to imitate Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin. Mind-blowingly perfect.

To my lucid-schizophrenic sensibilities (which can’t help but think it can divine the zeitgeist from mass poetic projections – especially when these projections are clearly sexualized, since after all sexual fetishization is essentially desublimated poetic experience), this signals a very important shift in attitude toward power. Recall again the 20th Century paradigm of political domination and its chief virtue: overwhelming force. The 20th Century commander almost couldn’t feel his power at all without the overcoming of resistance. If the conquered did not hate being conquered, but instead felt something bordering on gratitude for being subdued… were they really conquered? Was it an act of power or was it wimpy diplomacy? This ideal is clearly exhibited in second-wave feminism, a movement of intensely and intentionally unattractive women who threatened to dominate the world and purge it of everything a man could love. These were women who hated femininity in the name of femininity, and who couldn’t imagine exercising every power at her disposal to both dominate and serve. No: she was a 20th century woman, still so deeply dominated by the patriarchal paradigm that she had to win by the man’s rules using the man’s tools. The game of culture, however is not a game played by the rules, but rather a game played over rules themselves. As long as a player accepts the rules of the game as given, that player is losing the game. As long as the player is ashamed of her ownmost virtues she is hobbled. The game is the overcoming of shame.

Does this mean men will now be eclipsed by women? Is there a masculine counterpart to the Ass-Kicking Woman? The power struggle is not man versus woman. How nonsensical was that framing? Loyalty to one’s sex against the other sex? The new struggle as I see it is between androgynous complexity versus vulgar sexual unambiguousness. It is one of cultural humanity who accepts its own artificiality and self-responsibility as its true nature versus primitive humanity who helplessly and blindly submits to isolated instinct after instinct, whether the instinct is the market instinct or the vengeance instinct or the man-worship instinct…

I guess I’m a sexist of some sort.

*

Natural woman is unnatural.

Ouroboroses

Philosophy

Faith says: “I do not need to believe.”
Truth says: “I will see myself as false.”
Justice says: “Injustice is necessary.”
Honesty says: “I would lie.”
Piety says: “I will suffer disillusionment.”
Mercy asks: “Forgive what?”
Love says: “I am unjustified. I am justification.”

*

Apologies in advance:

Ouroboros,
Gorging torus,
Rolled up like an egg
Before us.

Gorging ouroboros

Beyond Good and Evil, 230

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Passage 230 from Beyond Good and Evil pretty much summarizes my understanding of the dynamics of culture, a dynamic known as the hermeneutic circle. Currently for me brand, design and politics are where this dynamic is most clearly exhibited.

*

I hadn’t read Nietzsche for a year. I am overwhelmed by him all over again, but because of all the tedious crap I read during my fast I find myself much better able to structure it, explain it and connect his themes to the oldest traditions of humanity. Not that he is not also saying something completely new – it is just solidly rooted in what preceded it, much as Christianity was rooted in Judaism.