An abyss was irremediably opened at the dawn of the West with the philosophy of Socrates and later with the Platonic myth of the cave, the myth of a new Being for Western Indo-Europeans. Plato constructed an analogy where the life of man on earth was equivalent to living inside a cave. The inhabitants of the interior of the Platonic cave perceived shadows projected onto the inner wall by outer beings. Among these shadows the cavern dwellers built their own idea of reality. In this analogy, the natural world, corresponding to the interior of the cavern, was only a poor imitation of the real world, outside the cave, representing transcendent and perennial ideas, the real essence of those illusory shadows.
With this myth, man’s essence was no longer associated with nature and was pushed up towards a transcendental plane. This was the birth of metaphysical dualism. The Ideal emerged in that moment as a new truth, outside of nature. In this myth, man and the world became only illusory shadows of something real. The father of all things was thought of from that moment on as a trans-mundane entity, perfect, without error or defeat. The essence of beings became an ideal, an eternal and moral archetype, good and perfect in itself. Metaphysical essence was thought immobile, unchangeable, incapable of fighting, a conservative entity that was largely unattainable, as well as transcendent, alien and improper to man.
At the historical moment at which the culture of life-as-struggle decayed and became Western dualist culture, values became universal substances whose essence was above natural reality. Jaan Puhvel, a scholar of Indo-European history, called this phenomenon Pandemonium. In this process —which occurred around the sixth century BC across many Indo-European cultures at the same time— the gods were transformed into representatives of eternal good and evil. The reformer Zarathustra created Mazdaism—dualism— by demonizing the devas of the sacred texts of the Avesta. The same thing happened in ancient India with - the Rigveda, which demonized the asuras. At this time, the Orphic mysteries and Pythagorean speculations arose, placing the origin of human vitality in supernatural beings, while Socrates and Plato conceptualized the theory of eternal ideas.
At this time Being in the West ceased to be struggle, the essence that united all of existence. Being was placed in the sphere of eternal ideas beyond man and nature. For this reason, some began to worship it as something distant and mysterious, while others ended up forgetting it, since it was separated from nature. The adoration of this metaphysical Being was the foundation of the European middle ages. On the other hand, neglecting Being is the pillar of modern nihilism. With this new cultural basis, western man assumed that all entities had two essences. On one hand, the natural or physical substance. And on the other, the ideal or metaphysical essence. In the West, the transmundane essence has been thought of as soul, unconscious, spirit, pure reason, or God. Thus, man has been fragmented in two, into a dualism of essences.
What is nature, exactly? To me, this sounds like a process of clarification, not a process of concealment.
>At the historical moment at which the culture of life-as-struggle decayed and became Western dualist culture
How is dualism anything but the radicalization of struggle? You have two completely opposite and irreconcilable poles.
>On one hand, the natural or physical substance. And on the other, the ideal or metaphysical essence. In the West, the transmundane essence has been thought of as soul, unconscious, spirit, pure reason, or God. Thus, man has been fragmented in two, into a dualism of essences.
Why can't we put it back together, then? Wasn't the old "nature" a reflection of both the natural world and the divine world, infused together?
>How is dualism anything but the radicalization of struggle?
Because,
>The Ideal emerged in that moment as a new truth, outside of nature. In this myth, man and the world became only illusory shadows of something real. The father of all things was thought of from that moment on as a trans-mundane entity, perfect, without error or defeat. The essence of beings became an ideal, an eternal and moral archetype, good and perfect in itself. Metaphysical essence was thought immobile, unchangeable, incapable of fighting, a conservative entity that was largely unattainable, as well as transcendent, alien and improper to man.
Can't struggle with this.
>Why can't we put it back together, then?
Philosophers have already done so. It's more just an issue of mentality. Dualism is basically engraved in our brains by this point.
This is literally just Heraclitus' philosophy
It's not Nietzschean, it's Heraclitean, and Nietzsche just took Heraclitus' ideas and added them to his own
Yeah, but why do you think Heraclitus is representative of ancient paganism?
>Can't struggle with this.
Why not? Sounds like the ultimate struggle to me. It's not even on the same plane that we generally exist in.
>Philosophers have already done so. It's more just an issue of mentality. Dualism is basically engraved in our brains by this point.
I don't get what you mean here. A dualism implies a split, not a unity or something "put back together."
>Why not?
Because
>It's not even on the same plane that we generally exist in.
It's totally beyond us. Untouchable. When God was just Nature- or the Laws of Nature- simply doing your best to live, forming communities, working, improving yourself and surviving, having kids and families, that was struggle with God. But when everything that we can interact with is nothing but a worthless ephemeral shadow, and God is too high up for us to reach, that's when you get monks.
>I don't get what you mean here. A dualism implies a split, not a unity or something "put back together."
I mean that philosophers had already realized by the 19th century and made up their own non-dualist philosophies, but that doesn't change the fact that for basically everyone the idea of metaphysics is not something that we can just abandon or forget about.
The West’s metaphysical dualism was not present in the Heraclitean worldview. According to Heidegger, one of Heraclitus’ most brilliant interpreters, this pre-Socratic philosopher was a non-metaphysical thinker, not even a pre-metaphysician, since that would mean a tendency to Western metaphysics. For Heidegger, to think like Heraclitus required a great effort.
>"You do not think metaphysically any longer. Heraclitus does not think metaphysically... To stop thinking metaphysically is more difficult than to not be metaphysical at all."
But as Heidegger observed, renouncing the Western cultural legacy was not something based on a rational decision.
>"We cannot reject Metaphysics like we reject an opinion. In no way can it be left behind as a useless doctrine which one no longer believes in. It would be futile to pretend that, because we sense the end of Metaphysics, we are already above it. Since Metaphysics, even when overtaken, does not disappear."
According to Heidegger, a return to pre-metaphysical thinking would be impossible, but one could possibly come close to it if one took into account that the product would necessarily turn out to be something new.
And to quote Nietzsche:
>Those things which mankind has hitherto pondered seriously are not even realities, merely imaginings, more strictly speaking lies from the bad instincts of sick, in the profoundest sense injurious natures... to deprive of value the only world which exists — so as to leave over no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even ‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick — ‘holy’ — so as to bring to all the things in life which deserve serious attention, the questions of nutriment, residence, cleanliness, weather, ahorrifying frivolity! Instead of health ‘salvation of the soul’... All questions of politics, the ordering of society, education have been falsified down to their foundations because the most injurious men have been taken for great men — because contempt has been taught for the ‘little’ things, which is to say for the fundamental affairs of life... What is the purpose of those lying concepts, the ancillary concepts of ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’, ‘God’, if it is not the physiological ruination of mankind?... When one directs seriousness away from self-preservation, enhancement of bodily strength, when one makes of greensickness an ideal, of contempt for the body ‘salvation of the soul’, what else is it but a recipe for décadence?
The goal of Nietzschean philosophy was to use the essence of the Heraclitean worldview to negate the path the West had followed, thus producing a turnaround that would establish the foundation of a new era of Being. In a meaningful irony, Nietzsche had Zarathustra, the great Metaphysical dualist, retract his old error. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra he made the very founder of Mazdaist dualism repent for adopting ideas foreign to the Indo-European essence and thus bringing defect and cultural annihilation to that people. Thus Spoke Zarathustra could just as well have been Thus spoke Socrates or Plato, the confession of cultural crime, a testimony invented by Nietzsche in order to rectify that error with a new gospel which annulled the previous one. A clear sign that someone has not understood Nietzsche’s message is to say that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was a tribute to the historical Zarathustra, a testimony of neo-Mazdean faith.
>The Nietzschean Zarathustra has little more than a name in common with the historical Zarathustra. In a letter to Erwin Rohdel he tells him that his Zarathustra is his own creation, without precedent, without precursor, and without peer. This is completely correct.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written as a Nietzschean sarcasm, a canto of modern anti-dualism delivered by a dualist of antiquity.
>I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, ending itself, is his work. But this question is itself at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognize it.
Heraclitean thinking had a major influence on Nietzsche. For him the pre-classical or pre-Socratic Greek tradition contained the clearest vestiges of the original thinking of life-as-struggle (Note that Greek mythology made "Chaos" the first thing to exist) which grounded his vitalist and hierarchical doctrine. For Nietzsche, ideas coming from other Indo-European peoples had brought much more fragmented and decadent cultural elements.
>It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws. Only a Greek was capable of finding such an idea to be the fundament of a cosmology; it is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of the Greek individual and the Greek state, taken from the gymnasium and the palaestra, from the artist’s agon, from the contest between political parties and between cities— all transformed into universal application so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn on it.
For Nietzsche, in Polemos there was no dualism and the forces in conflict maintained the struggle eternally, without final synthesis, without a teleological end, only perpetual strife as an agonal game of forces which were equivalent in essence, dedicated to the eternal dance of battle and the eternal creation of forms and appearance.
>The strife of the opposites gives birth to all that comes-to-be; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express but the momentary ascendency of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures in all eternity. Everything that happens, happens in accordance with this strife, and it is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed.
To create form (Gestalt) was the expression of life, like eternal combat, like the Will to Power. The sword of the warrior divided and gave appearance, it extracted form from the undifferentiated. In Nietzsche’s ethics the warrior was essentially a creative artist.
>There is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish... The form counts as something enduring and therefore more valuable; but the form has merely been invented by us.
The essence of life was not expressed in the fixed but rather the opposite, its common expression was change and becoming. Each being fought to maintain itself, although in the end it was hopelessly defeated in eternal combat. Struggle, then, was not only the creator of beings, but it was also presented as the way to preserve them. In the Heraclitean worldview, what allowed being in a stable world was the ability to fight and to limit the chaos of non-form, of nonbeing.
Heidegger called this ability to coagulate becoming,” Nietzsche called it “schematizing chaos.” Not “to know” but to schematize—to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.*’ For Nietzsche to fight, to create limits, to confront, to differentiate, to schematize, to organize, to create appearance and form, were not only human actions, but mankind’s essential action. This action resulted in a stable world, “the practical necessities for our preservation.”
>In the Heraclitean worldview, what allowed being in a stable world was the ability to fight and to limit the chaos of non-form, of nonbeing.
This is the metaphor intended by all those myths where the Hero or a Thunder God slays a sea serpent, (representing Chaos) and unleashes the flood waters, by the way. Chaoskampf.
Myth interpretation is the intellectual rock bottom.
It's the opposite of it. It's the absolute top, representing understanding of the highest human spirit, and in general myths are just the greatest works of art ever created.
Retard.
cry about it
>When God was just Nature- or the Laws of Nature- simply doing your best to live, forming communities, working, improving yourself and surviving, having kids and families, that was struggle with God.
When did this state exist?
>It's totally beyond us. Untouchable. When God was just Nature- or the Laws of Nature- simply doing your best to live, forming communities, working, improving yourself and surviving, having kids and families, that was struggle with God. But when everything that we can interact with is nothing but a worthless ephemeral shadow, and God is too high up for us to reach, that's when you get monks.
I just don't think that this "raising" of the spiritual plane necessarily leads to this complete estrangement the way you're describing it. It just seems like a "just so" story that could easily be interpreted a different way, e.g. infinite struggle.
Plus, we've never clarified what nature is.
wass da diffence betwin monism and non-dualism
>Monism
>A theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world. The doctrine that only one supreme being exists.
>Non-Dualism
>The idea that all of the universe is one essential reality, and that all facets and aspects of the universe is ultimately an expression or appearance of that one reality. In logic, a many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values [non-dual]
those two definitions are right if switched around, the one listed as the definition of monism is actually that of non-dualism and vice versa
Non-dualism is in OPs pic
Sounds like Heideggerian nonsense.
I don't think there is any evidence that primitive Indo-Europeans had this kind of quasi-Nietzschean conception of life. I recently read Fustel de Coulanges, he provides an interesting, less politically biased picture of the ancient Mediterranean cults.
>With this myth, man’s essence was no longer associated with nature and was pushed up towards a transcendental plane. This was the birth of metaphysical dualism.
In which we see the Noble Lie in action and the necessity for interrogation of the unwritten doctrines. Reification is a hell of a drug.
>At this time Being in the West ceased to be struggle, the essence that united all of existence. Being was placed in the sphere of eternal ideas beyond man and nature
Emanationsim and modalism is hard qrd lol lmao
The cave is a cope by rationalists. It's due to this people that all the subsequent suffering occurred.
>it's another episode of people thinking that ying yang means dualism and not non-dualism
PLURALISM = MONISM