The Ideal of the One Who Paves the Way. A study in Platonic political philosophy.

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Self-Lightening
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The Ideal of the One Who Paves the Way. A study in Platonic political philosophy.

Post by Self-Lightening »

On Nietzsche's "philosophers of the future"—from his momentous Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future—, the remarkable Canadian scholar Laurence Lampert rightly says:

"The philosophers of the future rule in the only way philosophers have ever ruled, through a new highest ideal." (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 78.)

In my view, however, he's wrong in identifying that ideal as the eternal recurrence itself, and not as the one who wills the eternal recurrence. This misidentification is made explicit in a later work of his:

"Before presenting the new ideal, Nietzsche describes the person capable of thinking it as an ideal: 'the most high-spirited, most alive, most world-affirming human being.'" (Lampert, Nietzsche's Task, page 118, quoting Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 56.)

What Nietzsche writes is: "the ideal of the most high-spirited" etc. Now Lampert appears to understand this "of" in a strictly possessive sense. However, it can also be interpreted in the sense of, for instance, the phrase "the ideal of selflessness".¹ To be sure, Lampert is right again when he says:

"The highest ideal for a world-affirming human being is that the world as it is eternally return just as it is." (ibid.)

But what's crucial, in my view, is that this ideal can never be a direct "means of effecting the rule of the philosopher of the future" (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 104). For, for non-philosophers, the eternal return of the world as it is is not an ideal, i.e., not something to desire.—I think Strauss, perhaps by virtue of his being a native German-speaker, did understand the aforementioned "of" in a not (exclusively) possessive sense. Inasmuch as Lampert does not, he is forced to read Strauss relatively badly at one point:

"In the final two sentences of his paragraph on the complementary man's solution to the most difficult problem, Strauss names two different actions with two different actors, an act by one who paves the way for the complementary man, and an act by that 'highest nature' itself." (op.cit., page 108.)

In fact, Strauss does nothing of the sort. There is nothing in Strauss's formulation to suggest that there are two actions; and the repetition of the phrase "unbounded Yes", which first occurred at the end of the preceding paragraph, and which Lampert interpreted correctly at the bottom of page 101, implies that there is only one action:

"While paving the way for the complementary man, one must at the same time say unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples. Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature." (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 190.)

There is no difference between saying unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples and postulating the eternal return of nature; there is no difference between the one who paves the way for the complementary man and that highest nature itself.² Nietzsche paved the way for philosophers of the future by being himself a philosopher of the future, by willing the eternal recurrence; the new highest ideal through which the philosophers of the future rule is the ideal of the philosopher of the future, in the non-possessive sense of the word "of"... One manifests this ideal, however, by openly and sincerely proclaiming the ideal of the eternal recurrence,³ by ardently wishing out loud "that the world as it is eternally return just as it is."

By willing the eternal recurrence, i.e., by having the eternal recurrence as one's highest ideal, one manifests oneself as a philosopher of the future, a Superman, a complementary man, or however you wish to call it. And for those who do not love reality enough to desire its eternal recurrence, that manifestation can be what the eternal recurrence itself cannot, their highest ideal. "I'm not sufficiently well-disposed toward reality to wish for its eternal recurrence; but I wish I was! I wish reality or I myself would be so changed that I should wish with all my heart for the eternal recurrence"... What the Superman does is, he shows that it's possible to be that well-disposed toward reality as it is.

What has attracted Lampert, a self-proclaimed non-philosopher, to philosophy? Was it that which the philosopher desires, wisdom? Or was it the philosopher himself, men like Nietzsche, Plato, Bacon, and Descartes? Aren't they the great erotics who arouse in non-philosophers the eros that makes them devote themselves to philosophy? Makes Lampert, for example, withdraw from society for protracted periods of time to write book upon book showcasing the brilliance of such men? Something he will probably keep doing, if possible, until the day he dies? These questions are of course rhetorical, and I think Lampert's kind of activity is the highest kind for a non-philosopher. He cannot and need not glorify reality itself; that must be left to actual philosophers. What suffices is to glorify them, as those who glorify reality. For by doing so, one illuminates the way that they paved for their kind.

Notes:

¹ The ascetic ideal, too, is in the first place a person. Thus in the express sequel to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche speaks of "[man's] will to erect an ideal—that of the 'holy god'" (On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Treatise, section 22. In Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", ''Genealogy of Morals', he calls his ideal the "counter-ideal" to the ascetic). The ideal of the "holy god" is surely the perfect symmetrical counterpart of the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being: "sanctus deus" contra "vitiosus deus"!

² Remarkable as it may be that the one who paves the way be the same as the one(s) whom that paving prepares, this is not a novelty introduced first in Nietzsche's mature philosophy. Thus in Nietzsche's early, posthumously published essay "The Greek State", the military genius is the instrument by which nature arrives at the state, i.e., at a classical organisation of society (its organisation into classes), which is the precondition of the development of Apollonian genius; and in the prototypical state, the military state, the genius that is developed is the military genius itself. (By "the development of genius", I mean the genius's sprouting and flourishing culturally, not naturally. This means that the initial military genius must sprout and flourish naturally. And the same goes for the initial Superman: Nietzsche had to sprout and flourish naturally, and because he did, Supermen can now sprout and flourish culturally. In Strauss's words: "It is however the history of man hitherto, i.e. the rule of non-sense and chance, which is the necessary condition for the subjugation of non-sense and chance." (Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 189.) Nietzsche came to sprout and flourish non-sensically, by chance, and because he did, men like him can now do so sensically, by design. And doesn't what Nietzsche wrote about the military genius also apply to the Superman? "The weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them." ("The Greek State".) What I'm suggesting is that the Superman "wills" the cultural sprouting and flourishing of Supermen first and foremost by manifesting himself as a Superman, by willing the eternal recurrence. In fact, I think that suffices—that the rest "is just the idleness of God on every seventh day..." (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", 'Beyond Good and Evil', end.)

³ By openly and exuberantly proclaiming one's will to the eternal return of suffering and inequality—"the prerequisites of human greatness" (ibid.)—, one wills present and future suffering and inequality, and thereby commands and legislates future such greatness. In other words: through unconcealed actual-philosophic greatness, one commands and legislates future such greatness. Thus Harry Neumann rephrases roughly the second half of Strauss's paragraph on the complementary man's solution to the most difficult problem as follows: "Although the past was responsible for the present egalitarianism detested by Nietzsche, for the most part it was characterized by the inequalities dear to him. However, lack of awareness of nihilism's threat formerly led men to take those inequalities for granted, to interpret them as necessary consequences of natural or divine justice. Modern thinkers culminating in Nietzsche made men aware that human creativity or technology was not limited by anything. Nietzsche feared that contemporary egalitarians would employ this unlimited power to create a world of universal peace and equality. He yearned for a superman whose will to overpower nihilism and egalitarianism would use modernity's immense power to create the eternal return of the past's inequality and wars. Then there would be no wars to end all wars." (Neumann, Liberalism, pp. 165-66.) The reason there would be no wars to end all wars is that at the very least the wars of the past would eternally recur. This also goes for the Superman: the Superman whose conditions Nietzsche creates is in the first place Nietzsche himself—the Nietzsche of the "next" cycle. And in the broad sense, it is in the first place all the Supermen of the past... But this is an absurdly literal interpretation of what Strauss describes. It's well-nigh inconceivable that, if time is not yet a circle, we could so to say bend it into a circle; let alone that we could ever know that we'd succeeded. It's highly improbable that we could ever cause a new Big Bang; but a new Great Flood is already much more probable...
Sunday66
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Re: The Ideal of the One Who Paves the Way. A study in Platonic political philosophy.

Post by Sunday66 »

I don't understand why people just copy and paste text. What is the point?
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Re: The Ideal of the One Who Paves the Way. A study in Platonic political philosophy.

Post by Self-Lightening »

Sunday66 wrote: August 6th, 2022, 10:40 pm I don't understand why people just copy and paste text. What is the point?
If you're referring to the quotes, I usually type out everything myself. But I suppose you don't necessarily meant it literally. What, then, you don't understand why people practice scholarship? Even so, my writings are not just scholarship; I'm an actual philosopher, not just a philosophical labourer (cf. aphorism 211 of Beyond Good and Evil). I am, however, rather like Plato than Nietzsche:

"[Plato] is not concerned with Plato—with his 'ipsissimosity'—and hence with Plato's writings, but points away from himself whereas Nietzsche points most emphatically to himself, to 'Mr. Nietzsche.'" (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 174.)

Compare:

"What saves Yesod is the direct ray from Tiphareth; this Sephira is in the direct line of succession." (Aleister Crowley, "The Book of Thoth".)

And:

"Every person, whatever his grade in the Order, has also a 'natural' grade appropriate to his intrinsic virtue. He may expect to be 'cast out' into that grade when he becomes 8°=3□." (Crowley, "Magick in Theory and Practice".)

In other words, you're out of your league here. But that was already clear from our little back-and-forth in the Aristotle thread.
"[If nature is esoteric,] the puzzle-quality of an esoteric text would not be artificial and obstructive of philosophy but rather natural and necessary, being an accurate imitation of reality." (Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, page 234.)
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Addendum to the OP.

Post by Self-Lightening »

There's a parenthesis in the central footnote of which not even I myself know where I meant to close it anymore... Also, I forgot to add that the thing about commanding and legislating refers to aphorism 211 of Beyond Good and Evil. And lastly, I wish to provide the end of my little essay "What Is Nietzsche's Sovereign Agent?" by way of an addendum to my final footnote:

::

It is, however, not necessary for the eternal recurrence of the same to be a fact—that is, for the philosopher's will to power, to that very recurrence, to succeed, to actually attain that mightiest of re-creations. As [Heinrich] Meier argues in his [Nietzsche] sequel, if not in its prequel, the philosopher's essential attainment consists in "attaining a height from which it is possible and permitted to converse with the heaviest task as play."¹⁰
Yet perhaps even more anti-moral than the will to the eternal recurrence of the same is Strauss's wish for the historical recurrence of the similar.¹¹ The philosopher of the future paves the way for the future philosopher by willing the repetition or rhyming¹² of the whole historical process, which could reduce even the memory of Christianity to a myth, if not to oblivion,¹³ thereby opening the possibility for something similar to arise. I have even seen Strauss accused, on some socialist blog, of trying to engineer a nuclear cataclysm by pressing a friendly senator during the Cuban Missile Crisis.—

Notes:

¹ Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Beatitude". Note that I do not agree with Crowley's Rousseauan(?) harmonism: cf. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal, page 38.

² Grant, "Time as History". I have combined the recorded lecture with the written text.

³ Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 100.

⁴ Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume II, chapter 26, translation Krell.

⁵ Strauss, lecture on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, May 18, 1959.

⁶ Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Of Redemption".

⁷ To be sure, the only reason I could "bear with" Meier on this point was the said discovery. My "sovereign insight" is not free-floating; it is "the subjugation of chance, of nature (Genealogy II. n. 2)", more precisely of the non-sensical and chance subjugation of non-sense and chance, i.e. the (un)natural subjugation of nature: cf. paragraphs 25, 34-35, and 19 of Strauss' "Note on the Plan".

⁸ Cf. Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, "Memory": "Consider that we can never know what is happening, but only what has just happened, even when most actively concentrated on what we call 'the present.'"

⁹ Cf. paragraph 7 of Strauss's "Note on the Plan"—where it is first said that "the most spiritual […] will to power […] consists in prescribing to nature what or how it ought to be (aph. 9)".

¹⁰ Meier, Nietzsche's Legacy, page 439, my translation: I use "converse" in the sense in which John Milton uses it, e.g. in Paradise Lost Book VII, verse 9, and Book II, verse 184.

¹¹ Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, page 130.

¹² This expression of the idea of historical recurrence is usually attributed to Mark Twain.

¹³ Cf. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, pages 232-35.
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Addendum to the addendum.

Post by Self-Lightening »

Partly because of my second back-and-forth with the little troll, I forgot to add the illustration I originally provided with my little essay. It's "Satan in His Original Glory", one of William Blake's illustrations for Paradise Lost. I saw myself reflected in it during the "mind-expanding experience" mentioned in my introductory essay, in the late spring of 2003.

"Yea, thou sublime one, one day shalt thou also be beautiful, and hold up the mirror to thine own beauty.
Then will thy soul thrill with divine desires; and there will be adoration even in thy vanity!
For this is the secret of the soul: when the hero hath abandoned it, then only approacheth it in dreams—the super-hero.
Thus spake Zarathustra." ("Of the Sublime Ones", Common translation.)

Yet that was not the best part of the trip; the best part, I really liked, was when I then saw through myself, into my "astral body" so to say, and saw Kether as an inexhaustible fountain (cf. Ecce Homo, Foreword, section 4) of light, which light then streamed through my third eye, through my Adam's apple chakra—Daäth!——in which, on my way up there, I'd almost choked, spiritually speaking I mean...—, all the way down to the "Achilles chakra" I'd discovered about six months before, when I broke out of my depression or anticyclone of five years by "Shiva-dancing" (Jim Morrison's around-the-campfire dance in "The End" at the Hollywood Bowl, but "on acid" so to say)... And the further down the light streamed, the darker it became, and I realized I shouldn't be attached to it, lest I be drawn down with it, but should focus instead on the source, the fountain,—the eternal present.

"[W]ho am I, who sing like a fountain in winter,
To die for the myriads of flowers in springtime?"
("Natural High", San Giovanni a Piro, early spring 1999).)
https://soundcloud.com/user-565243348/natural-high
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Addendum to the addendum to the addendum.

Post by Self-Lightening »

This concert truly shows the Doors at their peak. I think Jim should've stepped out of the game by the end of the year, for his own sake at least.
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Re: Addendum to the addendum to the addendum.

Post by Sunday66 »

Self-Lightening wrote: August 7th, 2022, 2:34 am
This concert truly shows the Doors at their peak. I think Jim should've stepped out of the game by the end of the year, for his own sake at least.
Nothing says serious philosopher like posting music videos.
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Re: Addendum to the addendum to the addendum.

Post by Self-Lightening »

Sunday66 wrote: August 7th, 2022, 12:24 pm Nothing says serious philosopher like posting music videos.
You wouldn't know a serious philosopher if he hit you in the face. But, speaking of music, did you visit "my" website? It's a playlist of 7,310 songs and counting (though I may also kick some songs now and then—I'm always polishing it, even behind the scenes). Not just any kind of songs, just as the video is by no means just any music video (which I posted to illustrate my coinage "Shiva-dancing"—did you even read that bit?); there's a whole philosophy behind my music, my taste in which I deliberately changed over ten years ago.

"It is a comfort for me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number—for everything outstanding is by its nature rare—: one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but—because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness, as privilege, indeed as a condition of existence; because one lives among clouds and lightning as among one's own kind, but equally among rays of sunlight, drops of dew, flakes of snow, and everything that necessarily comes from the heights and, when it moves, moves eternally only in the direction from above to below. Aspirations toward the heights are not ours.—Heroes, martyrs, geniuses and enthusiasts are not still, patient, subtle, cold, slow enough for us." (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 993 whole, Kaufmann trans.; cf. Thus Spake Zarathustra, "Of the Sublime Ones".)

Noble Beauty

Of course, I'm not casting these pearls here for you; I'm just making good use of the opportunity you've given me—for which, thank you!
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