Dedicated to the red and the white rose, to the eyes and the flame, to a more perfect unity... You can reach me @ cathasach71854@gmail.com
"But our commonalities are not looking so good at this time. I think of Nietzsche's comments about how there is nothing more powerful than when a slave class has learned to consider its existence an injustice and sets about taking revenge, not only on its own behalf but on behalf of past generations. ...A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits — and they may be of the first rank — are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.
The Problem of Modern Morality
Filed under: Christianity — by VisionsOfGlory14 @ 19:56
In a given metaphysical order, the moral and ethical precepts required of that order have a specific place in the hierarchal obligations of that system. These moral obligations function as boons to metaphysical completion in a given being. The rites in Catholicism and Mahayana Buddhism designed to achieve the purification from sin and the attainment of merit are perhaps the most explicit forms of this, and here, the moral elements of the rites are clearly put in service of the need to achieve a specific metaphysical aim: the attainment of Heaven or deliverance. When serving its proper function, morality meets its desired end.
When the sense of metaphysical reality is lost, the proper place for morality in metaphysical relation is lost as well. This is seen most explicitly in the modern world. Where morality ceases to serve its higher principle, it becomes abstract, loses its positive world-forming function, and has a deleterious effect on the virile functioning of the person. Made individual, morality loses its demonstrable value; there is no longer an effective basis for spreading its fruits.
Kantianism’s tyrannizing effect is both empirically seen among its practitioners and philosophically understood once one realizes the reality of the multiple states of the being. While claiming to give the individual the right to determine his own unique moral values, it actually subjects being to a series of rules that have only an illusory material value and no real collective spiritual significance. When put into full effect, the practice has only a limiting effect on the being’s potential and creates an impossibility for the individual to even imagine the existence of higher horizons.
Once the mistake of Western Philosophy is realized, that being is not the core of the individual and that this is obvious since its conscious and unconscious alteration is not only possible but continuously accomplished, both the allure of Kant’s philosophy and the illusion of its actualization are dispelled. Once realized, one understands that there cannot be a ‘moral basis for civilization,’ much less a universal brotherhood based on ‘common moral principles.’ Such bonds have a higher basis.
The initial reaction in the West to the sense of being’s loss as the center of the individual has been Nihilism and the claim of becoming as the only determinant. But it is not that being has no existence, only that it is conditioned and changeable by a spirit more transcendent. Similarly, morality is conditioned by being and is not the conditioner. This reversal has led to something of a denial of reality by claimants who do not understood that morality can be error or even downright immoral when its True awareness of the spirit and the ability to create moral order are only possible when this is known.
"What is less often remarked is that impermanence appears to assure a certain continuity in its own right when conceived as an extension of the self-correcting procedures of scientific discovery, which allow the scientific enterprise as a whole to flourish in spite of the constant revision of particular findings. A social order founded on Science, with its unnverving but exhilarating expansion of our intellectual horizons, seems to have achieved a kind of immortality undreamed of by earlier civilizations."
"The reactionary is, nevertheless, the fool who takes up the vanity of condemning history and the immorality of resigning himself to it. Radical progressivism and liberal progressivism elaborate partial visions. History is neither necessity nor freedom, but rather their flexible integration. History is not, in fact, a divine monstrosity. The human cloud of dust does not seem to arise as if beneath the breath of a sacred beast; the epochs do not seem to be ordered as stages in the embryogenesis of a metaphysical animal; facts are not imbricated one upon another as scales on a heavenly fish. But if history is not an abstract system that germinates beneath implacable laws, neither is it the docile fodder of human madness. The whimsical and arbitrary will of man is not its supreme ruler. Facts are not shaped, like sticky, pliable paste, between industrious fingers. In fact, history results neither from impersonal necessity nor from human caprice, but rather from a dialectic of the will where free choice unfolds into necessary consequences. History does not develop as a unique and autonomous dialectic, which extends in vital dialectic the dialectic of inanimate nature, but rather as a pluralism of dialectical processes, numerous as free acts and tied to the diversity of their fleshly grounds. If liberty is the creative act of history, if each free act produces a new history, the free creative act is cast upon the world in an irrevocable process. Liberty secretes history as a metaphysical spider secretes the geometry of its web. Liberty is, in fact, alienated from itself in the same gesture in which it is assumed, because free action possesses a coherent structure, an internal organization, a regular proliferation of sequelae. The act unfolds, opens up, and expands into necessary consequences, in a manner compatible with its intimate character and with its intelligible nature. Every act submits a piece of the world to a specific configuration."
But what is "pluralizing the particular political theology"? What does this mean? Is this some kind of imaginary third way? It's telling that this author feels the need to address Schmitt and Agamben, who are both driven with defining authority and power in democracies. Perhaps a fool's errand, but a brave one.
"In chapter 4, where I analyze the idea of 'miracle,' Schmitt's metaphor for the state of exception, I ask whether these identifications are themselves remnants of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary – god and miracle or divine agency – in the ordinary human world. [...] Schmitt and Agamben's 'state of exception,' I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory. In this chapter, I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt's account is based and from which it draws sustenance."
