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.
Rule of thumb
Sympathize up; empathize down.
Goodbye, 20th Century
Camper Van Beethoven’s “Sweethearts”
Beyond collective narcissism
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
Nothing bears scrutiny. Love disarms scrutiny.
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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.
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(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.
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Both the pure eye and the evil eye wish to see persuasively.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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Sympathize up; empathize down.
Heaven covers, earth supports
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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
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.
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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
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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.)
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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
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:
- Shiller’s “The Veiled Statue at Sais” vs the nakedness of Dionysus
- The character of the philosopher and the poet
- Thinking as surface, mask, simplification, “Woman” – as a yin counterpart to yang being (Dasein)
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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.
Halloween
Zoe spent much of last night explaining to people that, no, hers was a Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin costume.
Greek to Chinese
Dionysus
—o—
Changing yang
Order to primordial flux
Intoxication
Apollo
— x —
Changing yin
Primordial flux to order
Dream
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Pure yin: Borderline personality.
Pure yang: Autistic personality.
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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
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.
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Natural woman is unnatural.
Ow, my brain
(A tesseract, a 4-d cube.)
Ouroboroses
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.”
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Apologies in advance:
Ouroboros,
Gorging torus,
Rolled up like an egg
Before us.
Beyond Good and Evil, 230
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.
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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.
Nietzsche, Buber, Amor Fati, and Thou
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
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
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
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.
Glass salmon
Key passage
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.”