#life affirmation

[chernobog13]

Life affirmation and self motivation from Godzilla.

[scribblewise]

This week I'll try experimenting with believing that I have control over my life and that all my actions have value, and that value increases my control, like using that old Skyrim glitch that lets you make potions that increase your enchanting ability, and enchantments that increase your potion making ability. Yes, exactly like that. Like throwing rocks at each other in final fantasy tactics in battles where you've killed everyone but one guy, so you can reach insanely high levels way ahead of time. That's control, baby!!

[athousandgateaux]

In order to think and infer it is necessary to assume beings: logic handles only formulas for what remains the same. That is why this assumption would not be proof of reality: ‘beings’ are part of our perspective. The ‘ego’ as a being (—not affected by becoming and development). The fictitious world of subject, substance, ‘reason,’ etc., is needed—: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. ‘Truth’ is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations:—to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the ‘in-itself’ of things (we take phenomena as real). The character of the world in a state of becoming as incapable of formulation, as ‘false,’ as ‘self-contradictory.’ Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. Consequently, ‘knowledge’ must be something else: there must first of all be a will to make knowable, a kind of becoming must itself create the deception of beings…If our ‘ego’ is for us the sole being, after the model of which we fashion and understand all being: very well! Then there would be very much room to doubt whether what we have here is not a perspective illusion—an apparent unity that encloses everything like a horizon. The evidence of the body reveals a tremendous multiplicity; it is allowable, for purposes of method, to employ the more easily studied, richer phenomena as evidence for the understanding of the poorer. Finally: supposing everything is becoming, then knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being…If there ‘is only one being, the ego’ and all other ‘being’ is fashioned after its model—if, finally, belief in the ‘ego stands or falls with belief in logic, i.e., the metaphysical truth of the categories of reason; if, on the other hand, the ego proves to be something in a state of becoming: then— … Continual transition forbids us to speak of ‘individuals,’ etc; the ‘number’ of beings is itself in flux. We would know nothing of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see what is at ‘rest’ beside what is in motion. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of ‘empty space’ we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the ‘apparent fact’ of things that are the same. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be ‘comprehended’ or ‘known’; only to the extent that the ‘comprehending’ and ‘knowing’ intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of mere appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like ‘knowledge’; i.e., a measuring of earlier and later errors by one another

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, n. 517-520, pg. 280-281

[punmastercella]

[deadpeasants]

Brief History of Philosophy + I Treat u like Hermes

Socrates: Question what is believed/understood and you will asymptotically approach the Truth, never reaching it. Why? Because Truth contains an unknowable or irrational component outside the purview of rational discourse.

Modernists: Truth is knowable and wholly contained within a scientific set of knowledge, therefore attainable through rationality.

Post-Modernists: There is no Truth, only interpretations with irrational causes. Bad readings of Nietzsche.

Free Spirits: Truth is a biological drive. It exists at the interplay between an objective material world and a subjective interpreter who is rooted in that world. It is the result of rational and irrational processes alike and always has been. It is an objective impulse to subjectively model the objective.

You can't derive an "ought" from an "is." Luckily, evolution irrationally provided us an "ought." That is to say: life. Everything we perceive exists in (and as) a hierarchy of values oriented towards life. Everything that "is" happens to be tangled up in our very real, very human "ought." Or at least it was until we negated God by limiting Truth to rationality, paradoxically deracinating ourselves from the reality we sought to attain. Then all there was was the "is." Thus, nihilism.

Bleak, cold rationality cut from its life source like a rose snapped at the shank. For five conceitful centuries, we have watched it wilt on our mantle, congratulating ourselves for having the scruples to pluck it at its bloom. Still, it withers and shrinks. Has the hour not arrived to deliver it back to nature's fertile bosom, as Persephone to Demeter in the house of Zeus? Shall Hades grasp her forever? Or is it soon enough to hail the coming Spring? Where clouds gather, listen well, for in the thunder lies the answer.

[athousandgateaux]

To laugh is to affirm life, even the suffering in life.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 170

[punmastercella]

[punmastercella]