The Unknowable Pressed Play

a reply to: pthena

Good enough, I just wasn't sure if you were making fun and using the argument ad lapidem in yest.

For everything material the objective reality approach works fine, i guess the other part isn't even important right now, right here, we all get there eventually...

a reply to: Terpene

The truth about me is that I am no Vulcan (Epicurean suppressor of passion).

I read, write, think, and philosophize as if my life depended on it. That's not true for most people.

What I wrote on your Freedom Thread still stands.
In the final analysis, my voice is just a fart in the wind. That's freedom.

a reply to: pthena

I think I know what you mean.

Not much beyond priori vs. posteriori I lose interest in that grand debate. It can branch into all matters of things, which is interesting in conceptual form, but once it passes that certain technical threshold of abstract considerations and use of words I have to look up, it loses its appeal.

I want it boiled down to bullet points that have a more easily conceptualized application.

a reply to: Degradation33

That's why I decided to read Moby Dick.

Christian Atheism had a couple of big names; Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton.

I don't know what Altizer ended up with. He went the usual path of Nietzsche to James Joyce.

Hamilton, on the other hand went Moby Dick all the way. Became the World's expert. Right after he died there was a glowing obituary, news articles. Now I don't even see mention of his expertise in Wikipedia.

I just thought I might get more from Moby Dick than Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kant. Maybe one good book is worth a lifetime of bouncing from Worldview to Worldview, warping the mind in the riptides and undertows.

a reply to: pthena

Everyone can get more from Moby Dick. Whether or not it will stop them from drowning themselves is anyone's guess, but Nietzsche is acquired or you just get it.

I also think no one can have a true master morality. Because there is always some form of ressentiment going into even the noblest of views. And definitely going into the power crazed.

Any exalted will to power still can't just enforce its superiority, it has to meander through all the slave sentiments whether or not it's exploiting anything.

Trump is an excellent example of an apparent Master Morality, and strong will to power, that does nothing but devalue an opposing morality and insert victimhood in the style of slave morality. A strong will to power, and the traits associated with master morality are not always mutually inclusive with it.

And if you really look around the political landscape, of all the people positioning their moral superiority, is there ANYONE with an emancipated will to power or master morality? Any group or movement?

Where does the true master morality exist? Nowhere in publicized democracy. Nowhere in religion. Possibly some left somewhere in the Ayn Rand-like objectivism of Capitalism.

Maybe Switzerland has a master morality?

It's hard to pin down.

a reply to: Degradation33

I never really looked into Übermensch much. I haven't read any Nietzsche since the '70s.

I've never read Satanic Bible either, but some excerpts sounded sort of like will to power, like "we don't beg the deity for blessing, we demand it as if from a slave", something like that.

Trump says he was mostly influenced by Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking". If a person is far over on the narcissism scale, closer to pathological end than to the middle normal, almost any positive push that supports delusions of grandeur can set a person on the path to ego mania.

Some people loose it reading Dale Carnegie, How to win Friends.

'77, '78 I got the God Complex from a freaking Leadership Training focused on Hierarchy of Needs, by Abraham Maslow. That lead to reading his book and then Self Actualization, then next thing I knew I was God.

Luckily I had some physical labor to take my mind off of that. The lingering effects took a while to fade though.

I'm pretty sure that humility in the face of reality is better than thinking yourself able to master all that you survey.

I did put a quote from Moby Dick a few posts back.



Just from memory, when I read Zarathustra in '77, I felt, on an emotional level, that I was better than regular people. That might mean that quest for uber status has a built in arrogance that is a feature rather than a flaw. Possible.

a reply to: Degradation33

To me it's just another take, albeit a more interesting one, on the ever overly-monolithic monotheism, the endless cult of all cults that has at least a zillion times more political power and influence than it should.
Anything of the unknown that can be attributed to, believed in the singular can be done so in the plural.