All posts by anomalogue

Nietzsche, Buber, Amor Fati, and Thou

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

I started a new “Amor Fati” theme in my wiki, and was struck again with the idea that Martin Buber could have saved Nietzsche’s life.

This, however, does not mean that Buber could have told Nietzsche something that Nietzsche did not already know. It means that Buber could have gone to him… entered and shared Nietzsche’s world with him. He could have liberated Nietzsche from the plain-sight solitary confinement that finally crushed him, which Nietzsche always knew was fated to crush him, which he chose as his fate. Nietzsche would not abandon his cell:, the exit was sealed, but the entrance was open.

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The moral thrust of Nietzsche’s philosophy:

Following his liberation by skepticism, and subsequently his liberation from skepticism, newly freed to affirm and to will, a philosopher “goes under”: he immersively, forgetfully, participates in everyday life for the sake of learning.

The purpose of his learning at first appears to be to elevate himself as an individual to ever-new visions of life, but soon (and too late) the philosopher’s philosophy brings him to the realization that the substance and purpose of his vision extends far beyond the individual and individualism. However, this overcoming of individualism is, above all, not a retreat to contemporary collectivism. He finds another vision of both the individual and the collective that radically transfigures the meaning of both. That vision, from which the world is seen – both as a whole and in part – in a very new and better way, is height.

(A note on depth and height: The dimension of philosophical depth is existential and transcendental. It has to do with being, and being is outside the domain of memory. We cannot remember a state of being, per se, essentially; we only recall it. We call the state back to mind through recollecting the images in which the being was originally reflected. To know being, one must actually be there. “Going under” means being under, and being under means forgetting, no longer being at the height, no longer seeing from the height. All one can take with him is the mere surface fact of the height, a conceptual image of the height that at best serves to orient our movement, like a map, driving directions, or snapshots of landmarks.)

So, in going under, essential height is sacrificed for a time for the sake of comprehensive knowledge, which includes most of all knowledge of the “inward experience” of every “elsewhere”, of limitation and error. The pursuit of knowledge of the inward experience of “elsewhere” is sublimated justice: the capacity to experience all things as necessary, innocent and ultimately beautiful, which is what is meant by Amor Fati. The fully-seen, fully-affirmed inner-elsewhere is the knowledge acquired in the depths and carried back to the height. The learning of many kinds of being and many kinds of overcoming is the purpose of the forgetful participation in the everyday, but this is also another stage; the overcoming points to an eventual enduring overcoming: a stabilization of height.

Nietzsche said repeatedly that his own greatest danger was pity. Knowing solitude and the experience of suffering alone, he found it excruciating to know someone was suffering, much less suffering in solitude and he was overwhelmed by the desire to relieve that suffering.

His self-prescription, after several personal catastophes, was finally to go under only with his mind, but to keep his heart bound to the height. What does this mean, practically? It means that one must overcome the notion that the ideal of pity – of “suffering-with” – is the highest ideal, and to recognize a higher compassion, which Nietzsche called “joying-with“: “Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.”

Joying-with can appear to be a form of detachment, but it is a detachment only from a reflexive emotional response that undermines the long-term good. It is the opposite of indifference.

Recurring mask

Philosophy

Is it possible that Nietzsche’s harsh language of over-the-top sexism, power, domination, deception, valuation and revaluation was an exaggeratedly ugly mask for something precious and vulnerable, and perhaps profoundly traditional?

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By “traditional” I mean: perpetually misunderstood, forgotten and buried and perpetually rediscovered, unforgotten and resuscitated… again and again.

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If you speak about a tradition in traditional language people will find you very easy to understand, though what is understood is likely to bear no essential resemblance to what is meant. This is not a pitfall of religion, but rather one of religion’s great blessings: People in disagreement so profound that they are blind to their separation can nonetheless commune under common symbols. (This is how religions die; but it is also how they live.)

On rare occasions, though, being understood becomes necessary. Then, in order to avoid the subtle derailments of false familiarity, it is expedient to invent new, unfamiliar languages as an aid to re-cover the meanings that have been released from the prejudice of well-known, whited formulas. This approach, however, confronts people with the undeniable fact that they really do not understand, and do not even understand how to understand, and this triggers intense anxiety, which arouses hope in some but hostility in others. (It’s the hostility of alien poetry.)

Once meaning is recovered, the old forms become recognizably true again – if not provably in their own original sense, at least in an original sense.

What, How, Why

Philosophy

It is a colossal assumption to think that a moral attitude is determined by one’s knowledge and ignorance. If you agree on the “facts” of the situation it absolutely does not follow that you will agree on the best practical response to that situation.

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Whenever I read spiritual scripture and the best philosophy I always keep this in mind: two generals can survey the same battlefield and assess the situation identically, but then go on to attack and attempt to destroy one another. All armies tend toward similar principles of warfare and military discipline within their ranks. In this, there is common ground. Likewise, the traditional religions acknowledge the same metaphysical structures, and tend to prescribe similar moral principles. However, the essential purpose of an army is not in its What and How. It is all about the Why.

A good general sees his and his opponent’s “Why” written all over the battlefield. These Whys can be, but are not necessarily, the national cause. An interesting question: What if the very best generals do actually share a common Why, but a common Why who commands them to fight? Justice requires us to entertain this possibility.

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A general stakes his life on being more right than his opponent. The sheer reality of the casual utterances of generals can be comically overwhelming. A good example from General George Patton: “Gentlemen, the object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.”

Overcoming vs retreat

Philosophy

Two responses to a perplexing situation: One can attempt to retreat to the former known situation or one can overcome the present situation and move out into a new situation which is only known once one has emerged into it.

The retreat however is never a genuine return, because what characterized the situation prior to the perplexity was ignorance of contrast. To attempt to return to the past means to return to a state defined against the possibility of some other state: the innocence one once had is irretrievably lost. One will suffer from the irritable conscience of the reactionary conservative who consciously preserves the outward forms of truth which have already lost their essential persuasive force.

The only innocence the conservative still has is his mistaken belief that this willful dishonesty is faith.

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We cannot return to the womb. We can only realize that we are eternal embryos, living in a world of nested wombs, always preparing to emerge again into the next vision of life. An active spirit is always the son of his last self, and humanity as a whole is always the son of the last incarnation of man.

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Few people realize this, but the deep political fight – the one that is taking place beneath the symbol-hacking manipulations (which even the Democrats are finally embracing as a necessity of democracy) – is the struggle between the Straussians and the Pragmatists. Neither are viable, but of the two, the Straussians are probably more profound. If only they weren’t conservatives in the worst sense(s). My prediction is that this situation will reverse once the Pragmatists overcome their eudaimonistic tendencies, and consequently become more pragmatic.

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In politics, nobody is permanently of first rank. Strength makes a person stupid, and stupidity eventually makes a person weak, but weakness makes a person become strong, etc. You can count on it: the first will be last, and the last will be first.

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What is a liberal? A participant in the ugly process of birthing the next conservatism.

Key passage

Biography, Hermeneutics

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil, though universally relevant, is especially relevant for the designer who aspires to more than utilitarian goals (use-fulness and use-ability) and wishes to show our culture new ways of seeing, which in the parlance of the user experience industry is designated inadequately by the term “desirability”. These new ways of seeing can be quite trivial and have a strictly localized effect or they can penetrate deeply into a person’s experience of the world. What I am describing here is the essential continuum between design and true transformative art.

He who has followed the history of an individual science will find in its evolution a clue to the comprehension of the oldest and most common processes of all “knowledge and understanding”: in both cases it is the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience which are evolved first–it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter requires more strength, more “morality.” To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music of foreigners badly. When we hear a foreign language we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds we hear into words which have a more familiar and homely ring: thus the Germans, for example, once heard arcubalista and adapted it into Armbrust. {Armbrust: literally, “arm-breast”; both words mean “crossbow.”} The novel finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the case of the “simplest” processes of the senses, the emotions, such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotions of laziness, dominate.–

As little as a reader today reads all the individual words (not to speak of the syllables) of a page–he rather takes about five words in twenty haphazardly and “conjectures” their probable meaning–just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, color, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree. Even when we are involved in the most uncommon experiences we still do the same thing: we fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its “inventor.” All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first–accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.

In a lively conversation I often see before me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight–so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.

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One of my fundamental methods: to open out the meaning of individual passages I often string together scattered passages that inter-illuminate. Or, to say it as I experience it, I simply point out my own lattice of associations that spontaneously arise whenever I read something, even if I cannot articulate the connection. The form is analogical: a simple “this is like this.” The “this is like this, in that…” comes later – sometimes much later. My faith in my sometimes odd sense of analogy – my faith that is will lead me (nearly always along very uncomfortable paths) to insight – is one of my advantages as a designer and thinker, but it can lead me some strange places where people don’t really want to be.

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As anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn knows, it is anomalies that force scientific revolutions. Your sensitivity to anomalies and your readiness to question the structures and analogies that constitute knowledge determine the point where you break from the dominant paradigm and allow it to dissolve back into the anomalies (the phenomenal flux, the primordial chaos) from which it came before it was formed by language and logic into knowledge. This dissolution permits new analogies, new ways to makes sense, new ways to spontaneously experience the world, new ways to love.

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I like to place the words “design” and “designate” side by side and think about them together.

Design is a microcosm of culture. That is why I care about design.

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I’ve always liked the Shins “Mine’s Not a High Horse”: “These are the muddy waters / I’m swimming in to make a living / Were I to drown in them / Should come as no surprise.”

Skepticism and probability

Ethics, Hermeneutics

Some people, when faced with uncertainty, weigh all the factual and interpretive possibilities and respond to the one that seems most probable. Sometimes they’ll cycle through a whole series of possibilities, one at a time.

Others generate multiple possibilities, and weigh the degree of uncertainty of each, looking for overlap between the most plausible possibilities. They then respond practically to the whole probabilistic cloud as a single situation.

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The latter approach is optimal for hermeneutics, for concepting, for psychology, and for pretty much any situation involving extreme indeterminacy or doubt. There’s the facts and there’s the interpretive arrangements, and each modifies the other. Knowing how to dismantle an interpretation (which can look for all the world like reality itself) into bits of data and then to reassemble them into multiple divergent interpretations, when combined with an active imagination and a nuanced recall results in the capacity to generate a vast array of persuasive possibilities. Everything is left liquid to some degree. It’s a gift and a curse.

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For a skeptic, no knowledge is complete until it includes the meta-knowledge of ground of certainty. To lose track of this is to lose command of the knowledge.

Win-win

Biography

What allowed me to return to work after hiding out for several years in an excessively undemanding environment was a key insight: the pain that had made work intolerable was not meaningless, but was in fact latent philosophical problems pressing for illumination and resolution. When pain and productivity go together, the options generally come down to feeling good or doing good work, and both are more than acceptable.

Turn

Philosophy

The theme of “the turn” in my last post (“Wiki activity”) is probably due to the fact that I watched Into the Wild last night. As I’ve said before I experience this film as a philosophical tragedy – or maybe just plain old tragedy.

I keep wanting to relate this myth to Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”. Is it a different kind of tragedy – perhaps a feminine analogue? – or is it the same tragedy seen from another perspective?

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Alaska, bears, salmon, cold, white, north, hyperboreans… tragedy.

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I’ve created a new theme (the third this morning) in my wiki: North.

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I wish now that I’d taken a picture of the stained-glass salmon I gave a friend of mine. All I have is the plan I used to build it.

Wiki activity

Philosophy

I indexed all the direct (and some indirect) references to Logos in my wiki.  (When prompted enter “generalad”.)

Then I indexed several key passages treating what I’ve called “solipse“, or what is traditionally called “spiritual childhood”, “idealism”, and “existentialism” – the dangerous temporary autism (a state in which a thinker needs parental guidance) through which all genuine philosophers seem inevitably to pass. I also included some other passages describing the “turn“, moving beyond solipse into encounter with the Other, or Thou.

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I opposed “solipse”, the philosopher’s autism, with “eclipse”, the complementary modern state (which corresponds with borderline disorder), a world founded on a materialist metaphysic, where self is nearly wholly determined by reflections of “itself” in the eyes of others. The universe is composed of objective entities, including the self who occurs within the universe. The turn is the discovery that idealism is not necessarily founded in the individual (or not solely in the individual), but rather in a culturally-sustained, but also culturally-active self, who is one scale in an infinite transcendent nesting of consciousness whose form or image is Logos. [I just happened upon a diagram I made during Christmas ’07 of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of eclipse and solipse.]

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A simple definition of “metaphysics“: interpretation of phenomena which extends beyond the phenomenal. We do it constantly without noticing, for instance when we believe in past and future, or in space or material, or in the unconscious… The hardest metaphysical extension of all –  the riskiest, most vulnerable,  but most rewarding – is opening to the full belief in one another as true Other, as Thou: saying “Namaste” without reserve.

Religion mashup

Philosophy

Do you think you can be “reborn” if you haven’t died? “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than for a man richly overloaded with history to pass into a new vision of life. The encumbrance of history is what Buddhists call “karma”.

Magic is boring

Philosophy

Philosophy is much stranger than magic.

Magic preserves the mundane structures of life but paints the skin of things with outlandish attributes. Philosophy attacks and changes life’s fundamental structures, rendering life – as a whole and in detail – spontaneously, weirdly new.

For this reason magic is perpetually popular and philosophy is perpetually shunned.

Nietzsche on anatta

Philosophy

Your world stands on your immediate experience in the same way that a tree stands on its trunk.

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From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 54:

What, at bottom, is the whole of modern philosophy doing? Since Descartes – and indeed rather in spite of him than on the basis of his precedent – all philosophers have been making an assault on the ancient soul concept under the cloak of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept – that is to say, an assault on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, as an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or openly, anti-Christian: although, to speak to more refined ears, by no means anti-religious. For in the past one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned – thinking is an activity to which a subject must be thought of as cause. Then one tried with admirable artfulness and tenacity to fathom whether one could not get out of this net – whether the reverse was not perhaps true: “think” the condition, “I” conditioned; “I” thus being only a synthesis produced by thinking. Kant wanted fundamentally to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved – nor could the object: the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, that is to say of “the soul,” may not always have been remote from him, that idea which, as the philosophy of the Vedanta, has exerted immense influence on earth before.

(In a preceding passage Nietzsche distinguished between a Germanic “Northern” Christianity and a Mediterranean “Southern” Christianity. When reading Nietzsche, I try to keep his attitude toward surfaces in the front of my mind. Unlike things, opposite things are sealed into the same skin and taken for identical. Especially notice his designations for “Christ”. “The Redeemer” and “the Crucified” should never be taken for synonyms. The person designated by “the founder of Christianity” is ambiguous; the singular article is plainly ironic.)

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Extending this thought: the substance of thinking – the language, the metaphors, the methods, the sense of relevance – where does that originate? There is a sense in which all things are founded on the immediacy of phenomena, but the questions of what elements of the phenomenal life-world are taken up and structured, and how and for what purpose the structuring is attempted and accomplished leads off beyond both the immediacy of phenomena and the (apparent) immediacy of the ego. It is clear that our “individuality” is articulated from a culture who transcends us. This realization, if it persuades you, cannot leave your morality intact. It changes absolutely everything.

 

Snippet

Biography

Me: Men are insane. That is all that is good about men. We find some totally unjustifiable kernel of insanity and build logical and practical systems out of them until they look for all the world like something sane.

Micah: But that is sanity.

Particity

Ideas

Particity: participatory being in relation to a whole who transcends it.

This statement, I think, refers to particity: “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.”

I am interested in recognizing evidence of the particity that saturates the being of a self, and the interpretive tricks used to explain it away or cover it over in order to preserve our individualistic conceits. Imagine each of us as participants in a conscious being trying to come to terms with itself through our ordinary (no unusual or supernatural conceptions added) human interactions. Why not? A mind can be of two minds on a matter and remain a mind.

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I understand Logos to be the being that arises from beings participating in dialogue who through their participation become a unity that exceeds each but includes both.

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A series of statements from Heraclitus, who lived 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ:

Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it — at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth.

My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.

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We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.

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Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it.

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Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.

 

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Now read this as if you’ve never heard it before:

In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

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…For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

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Useful, usable and desirable

Biography

We live our lives practically, tending to the necessities, seeking convenience. The time left over we spend on the pleasantries of life. We work hard, then we play hard.

We design our lives around usefulness and usability, then try to tack on a little desirability at the end of the process.

This cannot continue.

We must expect much, much more.

If you want to feel content with your life, avoid me. I will sow the seeds of discontent in you so that you will have no rest until you love your life and want to outlive your life.

Loving your life means your life needs no justification. You look out at the world and just love.

I have no respect for the ideal of painless comfort.

Justice

Philosophy

“You do not know men. Men are difficult to understand if we want to be just. Do they know themselves? Can they explain themselves to themselves? Most of those who have deserted me perhaps would, had my luck held out, never have suspected their defection. There are vices and virtues born of circumstance.” – Napoleon

Acquiring a taste

Philosophy

One must learn to love. — This is our experience in music: we must first learn in general to hear, to hear fully, and to distinguish a theme or a melody, we have to isolate and limit it as a life by itself; then we need to exercise effort and good-will in order to endure it in spite of its strangeness, we need patience towards its aspect and expression, and indulgence towards what is odd in it–in the end there comes a moment when we are accustomed to it, when we expect it, when it dawns upon us that we should miss it if it were lacking; and then it goes on to exercise its spell and charm more and more, and does not cease until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who want it, and want it again, and ask for nothing better from the world. It is thus with us, however, not only in music: it is precisely thus that we have learned to love everything that we love. We are always finally recompensed for our good-will, our patience, reasonableness and gentleness towards what is unfamiliar, by the unfamiliar slowly throwing off its veil and presenting itself to us as a new, ineffable beauty–that is its thanks for our hospitality. He also who loves himself must have learned it in this way: there is no other way. Love also has to be learned.

(Nietzsche, The Gay Science)