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.

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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.

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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.

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… 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.

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

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

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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.”

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(A tesseract, a 4-d cube.)

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.

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.

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.”

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.