Spacelight, continuing.

Below is a mail I wrote roughly around midnight your time last night.

::

Dunno if you're still on your road trip, and if you are, or if you just got back, I don't want to disturb you, so I'm writing a mail instead. Just took a trip, and still coming back from it, for the first time in months. It was the species and dosage I had my "spacelight" idea on, and again, they turned out a great pick. That idea may have to become known as my "one great idea". Walking along a canal while eating pita gyros pork recently, I already figured that my idea means it's not really true that the stars we see in the sky no longer exist; what we see is part of their activity all those zillion light years ago... That whole space is part and parcel of their activity. Yet that also means what's happening now in our tiny corner of the universe, belongs to the gold and oil splendour of the stars. The universe is as glorious as ever, but we're living in the age of past glory. Yes, some of the past is still great, but it's becoming ever less. And I've been nothing if not a brilliant reflector on that greatness ("the one in the shades", I applied to myself as a description even during my songwriting days).

At this point I really had to eat something, so my trip will probably really wear off now. Yet it's precisely my task to keep such insight alive. Day insight is dazzling, but night insight really probes what it comes down to: those precious impressions made by our fathers in their heyday, absorbed (as we are) in their rich heritage, the heritage of knights and kings and everything best in man. Rosy-coloured, sure, but aren't those the best colours? "Roseate metallic blue" etcetera?

I'm thinking now of posting this on my forum. Earlier, I'd played with the thought of posting it on your Facebook wall--as a comment on that waterfall photo, for example.

::

That's it. Later, when I was trying to get to sleep, I wrote the following memo on my phone:

"Space is light that has not yet lit. It is all the times light can lig[ht.]"

We should also think of lighting as in "A Little Bird Lit Down On Henry Lee": light only lights when it lights down on our retinas, for example.

My first spacelight trip was especially inspired by quantum entanglement.

When starlight lights on your retinas, the space it was--all the way from the star to your eyes--becomes zero. Of course, that just goes for that "one" wave/particle of spacelight. Countless others still exist, so the spacetime between the star and your eyes remains--until there's no more of its light to reach you (i.e., when you've seen past the death of the star).¹

This also explains quantum entanglement: the two wave/particles or whatever are really a single space, until one of them "lights" (starts spinning): then the space becomes zero, and all this causes the other wave/particle or whatever to starts spinning in the opposite direction. There's really no spooky action at a distance here; before they started spinning, they were the distance...

I think "spacelight"--or "spacelite"!--is the perfect name for this layman's (poet's!) take on cosmology.

¹ EDIT: This goes for any lightsource, not just for stars. Also, there can never be total darkness anywhere, as that would require absolute vacuum--nothingness. Where there is no spacelight, there are objects--and on the subatomic level within the objects, there is spacelight. And what is not spacelight about the objects is spacelight that has lit, and is therefore neither space nor light, but now spinning/particles. "Inert" light.

Note that I thought of this post while doing my daily Holosync and vaping weed. The writing was done increasingly less high and more stoned. It may be a case of mihi ipsi scripsi in retrospect: I think it reads like rambling, raving even. Still, the ideas in there are at least more sound than the style may let on. I may clarify/expand on them here in the future.

::

Barl the Bald wrote:Where there is no spacelight, there are objects--and on the subatomic level within the objects, there is spacelight. And what is not spacelight about the objects is spacelight that has lit, and is therefore neither space nor light, but now spinning/particles. "Inert" light.

Of course, I don't use the word "object" lightly (no pun intended). An object is supposedly something about which the question "what's it like to be that thing" is meaningless. I therefore assert we can ultimately make no sense of things like that, since we, ourselves, are things it's something like to be.

But, one may interrupt, didn't you basically contrast objects with spacelight? So doesn't that mean space/light is not a subject in this sense? Well, perhaps! Perhaps spacelight is not a subject--which I understand as a self-valuing, of course.

If I may assert (myself) a bit: spacelight can perhaps be understood as a self-valuing, but space itself (i.e., space as an empty concept separated from time, which latter is also empty if separated from space) is mere valuing, without self-reflection yet.

The last paragraph may be disregarded. I will assert baldly now: spacetime, the universe, the Big Bang, the White Hole, is a Deigning to be valued. It is a taking that's at the same time a giving, of itself completely. Giving to what, then? Well, to itself, for it's the taking that is the giving. Same for the taking...

The Big Bang is a movement in all dimensions which is thereby not just one movement but also dual (not to mention triple and more yet), for it's then a movement in all opposite dimensions. And the two, its simplest self-division, cannot be equal, for then it wouldn't be two different sides. The ever so slightly hotter parts of the Big Bang became star clusters, the less hot ones the space between them.

But wait, this means the hotter parts became the light sources while the less hot ones became the light--namely, the space, the spacelight. However that may be, let's look at a single lightsource, or the White Hole as a whole, or any such Deigning. So long as it's not impeded by something else, it radiates outward in all directions. This occurs in waves--one may think of when one drops a stone in water and looks at it from straight above (this makes it two-dimensional, for now). What I'm saying is that quantum entanglement means that two opposite wave/particles of that wave, or two opposite "cones" within that wave (and one completely round wave can be thought of as one or multiple wave-cones whose angle is 360 degrees (or more))--that two opposite wave-cones are to be thought of as a single round wave: when one of the cones is impeded by something--say, a stone breaking the water surface--, this "something" causes a return wave which affects the whole original wave, but in the opposite direction of that wave-cone.

Now the Deigning I spoke of is an allowing for this to happen. It is a condescending from--what, nothingness? to have one's valuing, the valuing that one is, be valued by another valuing and thereby only be able to be(come) a self-valuing. It is a dishonoring of oneself, from the self-sufficiency of nothingness (...)--it is a loving. In loving however one honours and dishonors oneself and the other(s) at the same time. (I write "dishonor" the American way so as to honour Dishonored 2, and the series as a whole!) One honours the other with one's stooping, one's kneeling. Love is simply when this is intended/hoped to be, or when it actually is, mutual. I call this Honour of Love.

Fixed Cross has said--and I quote or paraphrase from heart only--that he's never distinguished between mind (geest) and heart. I would now like to say: Yes, and this means heart-mind and mind-heart are one. VO is indeed the teaching that does not take itself, or its student/teacher, out of the equation. As such, it's a revelation.

::

Having read it again, I no longer think it reads like raving. Also, of course I meant VO as encompassing the teaching of the will to power.

::

What I'm basically saying with "spacelight" is that light is not a wave, but a wave-function... But let's really get back to basics.

A mathematical point has no dimensions. We can simulate this with a pencil whose tip sits still on paper. Sure, we had to move through space and time to get to that situation, but let's suppose it spontaneously came about. Now the simplest way to move the pencil across the paper is in one dimension: this makes it draw a line, let's call it the length line. If we could now move this line across the paper--whether straight up, straight down, or by rotating it--, this occurs in the second dimension. Thus we can call the whole paper, when flat, the length-breadth plane [or area plane]. And, when looking straight at the paper while both we and it are suspended in vacuum, we can move it closer and farther from us. This vacuum room we can call the length-breadth-height room [or space room].

Now what I'm saying is that, whereas other waves move in a medium (are the moving of a medium)--water, say, or air (e.g., sound)--, light is actually space, a three-dimensional space; but not a length-breadth-height space, but a space one of whose three dimensions is time (it doesn't matter which, it's just a matter of perspective). Space/light is a wave that doesn't move toward us, say in depth (I see now I could also have said length-height-width), but which has always already been "with" us, stretched out from its source to us. But for us, it only becomes "three-dimensional" (namely, four-dimensional!) when we interfere with it, causing it to spin for example (giving it an extra dimension). This however changes the wave function that it is, retroactively or "instantaneously" giving it an opposite spin on the other side of the "pond".

A lightsource as big as a star has considerable mass, meaning it massively affects "the fabric of spacetime". But any thing with mass, in fact "having mass" itself actually means giving a fourth dimension to--let's call it the depth-width-time plane, the blank canvas lighttime. But I'm beginning to befuddle myself even, so let me leave it at this, for now.

Here's some stuff I wrote a week ago:

::

[Here's a song] that spontaneously got into my head in the course of my forelast experience with shrooms:



[... I]t perfectly represented the theme of that trip, my spacelight idea. It came into my head from my memory, even as starlight comes to us from many lightyears in the past (yes, I'm aware that a lightyear is a measure of distance, not time...). Space, "dark, empty space", is light; there is no total darkness anywhere. But before a light gives light, it gives space; when it gives light, when it lights down on a retina, say, this decreases the space ever so slightly (other things being equal). Thus my last notebook entry on my idea reads:

"When a spacelight quantum 'lights', the electron (say) that absorbs it becomes slightly more charged and thereby slightly more heavy, increasing its gravity ever so slightly."

And one before it even puts it as simpl(isticall)y as "radiation = -gravitation"... [...]

::

My other unpublished "notebook entries" on my idea read:

"rubber glove" (this image combines the expansion of the universe with spacetime curvature);

and:

"heat = mass".

Mitra-Sauwelios wrote:My other unpublished "notebook entries" on my idea read:

"rubber glove" (this image combines the expansion of the universe with spacetime curvature);

and:

"heat = mass".

So make that "rubber glove with holes at the fingertips" (really not a glove but an expanding balloon that's bumped "in" from the inside).

::

Next notes:

1.

Light is [what happens] when the darkness is valued.

("Dark, empty space"...)


2.

The reason the expansion of the universe first accelerated, then decelerated and then accelerated again is
1) that the Big Bang was the transition from no expansion to expansion, which could therefore only be accelerating expansion (or rather, the Big Bang is that expansion itself, which thereby contrasts with no expansion);
2) that, whereas this Something first asserted itself in accelerating away from the "Nothing" in its past, the reverse side hereof had to be its decelerating away from the "Nothing" in its future;
3) that the "Nothing" is now tearing it apart. [Or rather, the Something is pushing itself apart, since there's Nothing to stop it. I think the last two changes can only be explained by looking at what concretely happened within the system, not by thinking about it abstractly like I've done here.]

The initial acceleration phase is the Creation phase (the universe's coming into "Being"); the deceleration phase is the Preservation phase (the universe's "Being"); the current acceleration phase is the Destruction phase (the universe's approximating Nothing).

Below is a private message I wrote a month ago. I post it here because it contains the next step in spacelight.

[...] This "self-valuing logic" is actually an elaboration, and pretty much the perfection, of the non-political dimension of Nietzsche's teaching ("Zarathustra's night-wisdom"); it's also knowns as Value Ontology. It was first conceived by my best friend [...]. I think I've added to it, though, especially with my conception of what I call "spacelight". I'll link you to my forum thread on it, but be warned that it's marred by abstraction and some parts of it are just plain wrong: https://pathos-of-distance.forumotion.com/f7-science
Since then, I've made quite some progress. For one thing, I wrote this draft:
"[N]ature is ultimately just custom—unless it be nature as a whole, perhaps—the universe and what precedes and succeeds it. I tried to focus my trip on spacelight, on that whole or hole, but 'Mother Ayahuasca' bade me leave such mysteries—mysteries, and focus on more 'concrete' matters (as she'd been bidding me on weed, but less clearly). This then gave me an overview, not only of dark matter and dark energy (vacuum energy!), but also of modern history. Every wave of progressivism will always have a strong future body of conservatism attached to it. This is the nature of nature, the way space and its losses work. But I've started to ramble.
The point is that every realm, every kingdom, has its boundaries and its tolls, but the modern prince Machiavelli has been taking excessive toll for too long now (and 'Nothing' is really beyond its [i.e., his kingdom's] boundaries). Progressivism or, in popular parlance, the 'Left' is ultimately as morally bankrupt as the liberal conservatism of the 'Right'[.]"
That's where that draft ended, without even the last period. As you can see, I've been tending away from First Philosophy [the non-political dimension of philosophy, metaphysics/cosmology] and toward political philosophy. This is my day wisdom. Leo Strauss originally ended his "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero" lambasting Heidegger:
"[W]e [Alexandre Kojève and Strauss] both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur ["themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others"—Heidegger was a Nazi] were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of Being." https://archive.org/stream/LeoStrauss-RestatementOnXenophonsHeiro/Strauss-RestatementOnXenophonsHiero_djvu.txt
I must face present day tyranny, but I cannot do it alone—and no, even my best friend won't do. I need what David Keirsey, in his work on personality types, has called a mindmate. By the way, I personally find much good in Heidegger as well. In fact, it was in great part he who made me see space is mind, and mind is space... Spacemind, then. I only just thought of that now!

Below is most of a post in a private discussion with a friend of mine.

::

[...]

Will to power may not be hidden, but is it really in clear sight? Lampert argues that the insight into will to power is Zarathustra's "night-wisdom". The will to truth is the will to Being (see WP 853; but Kaufmann reads "Sein" as "Schein", his usual translation of which is "mere appearance"). Being in the Parmenidean(?) sense, as opposed to Heraclitean Becoming. Now WP 635 says:

"The will to power not a being [Sein], not a becoming, but a pathos—the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge..."

So the will to power mysteriously transcends Being and Becoming... Compare:

"It is interesting [...] that Heidegger did not inquire into the aporetic temporal character of khôra [in Plato's Sophist] but instead took a decidedly Parmenidean slant on its interpretation and related it to the khorismos or gap between Being and beings. In other words, instead of reading the strong indications in Plato that khôra is a material entity that lives eternally between Being and becoming, Heidegger de-realizes it as an existent being and reinvents it as a mere gap or notational spacing or interval [...]
Heidegger's natural tendency as a thinker runs so powerfully in the Parmenidean direction of thinking, not toward the interminable impurity of the difference, which is Nietzsche's obsession, but toward the purity and noncontamination of the duality of beings and Being, of their 'totally different' sites." (Lukacher, Time-Fetishes, page 21.)

Nietzsche realizes, or at least personifies, Life as a kind of entity that is, however, not just one among many beings: for example, Life speaks thus to Zarathustra:

"And even thou, discerning one, art only a path and footstep of my will: verily, my Will to Power walketh even on the feet of thy Will to Truth!" (Z, "Self-Surpassing".)

And at the end of NcW Epilogue, N suggests that the Truth is, as the Greeks named her, Baubo—that is, Vulva, countless folds or layers with a hole in the center... This is how I now understand art, the will to power as art:



All art is, first and foremost, the art of introduction... The ER means the whole cosmic process is Nothing but an introduction to itself—to Nothing besides itself...

"Nature's beneficence, the goodness of nature, is affirmed [by Zarathustra] in the only way now possible, as a process of becoming, as history, as a rule of non-sense and chance that necessarily generates fragments and that has no outcome in wholeness other than the complementary Yes pronounced on the process by the complementary man." (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 107.)

That affirmation is the will to the eternal recurrence of the world as will to power.

"While the genealogy of Parmenidean Being leads through Aristotle's notion of the 'prime mover' as 'thought thinking itself' (noesis noeseos) (Metaphysics 1074b34) and dominates much of the spiritual history of the West, the Heraclitean-Anaximanderian genealogy of the names for time's namelessness, in other words, the genealogy of eternal recurrence, would constitute a kind of counterhistory, a strange kind of 'bastard reasoning', as Plato calls it in the Timaeus, neither muthos nor logos." (Lukacher, op.cit., pp. 19-20.)

In a world of becoming, the only God is the God of BGE 56, the only noesis noeseos is poiesis poieseos.

"If one understands 'truth' in the concept 'will to truth' as the truth in truthful show [Schein], then the will to truth is no more only a will to so-called truth; it is then rather the will to poiesis or, as Nietzsche says here, to 'making', that is to say to the production of a show which does not negate life but affirms it; which is thereby in unison with life and thanks its truth to this unison." (Picht, Nietzsche, page 282.)

And all of another, and most of yet another:

1.

Are you suggesting the world is not the will to power and nothing besides, but there's something else besides it—something bad?

I think it's the Nothing itself that is the "bad" thing besides the will to power. As Nishitani says, "[b]eings-as-a-whole become strange and alienating through being wrapped in nothing. This is the 'nothinging' of the Nothing[.]" (Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, page 167.)

This problem can only be surmounted in knowing, that is, in affirming. Recall that Strauss quote how, in a world that is will to power and nothing besides, the only way there can be knowledge is by willing the recurrence of that world. In that way, willing is transformed into acceptance. The knower thereby transcends the will to power, and becomes one with the "Nothing", which is and is not will to power—is and is not a being.

2.

[...] I suspect that Strauss, being a Jew, knew some Kaballah. In Kaballah, Knowledge is a kind of non-Sephira above all Sephiroth except the Supernal ones. And the "lowest" of the Supernals is Understanding. And elsewhere, Strauss writes:

"We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noeseos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God. This experience is entirely independent of whether what we understand primarily is pleasing or displeasing, fair or ugly. It leads us to realize that all evils are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding. It enables us to accept all evils which befall us and which may well break our hearts in the spirit of good citizens of the city of God." http://www.ditext.com/strauss/liberal.html

In Nietzsche "deadly truth" is the superlative of "ugly truth". So the superlative of "fair or ugly" would be "life-giving or deadly". I contend that the will to the ER of the world as WTP is indeed not knowledge but understanding, wisdom even (Wisdom is the first Sephira "above" Understanding). In fact, I think the insight into the WTP is "understanding" (night wisdom), whereas the will to/acceptance of (I suppose we can simply say "affirmation" instead of "will/acceptance") the ER is "wisdom" (day wisdom). Thus Lampert shows, in his first book (which I don't have at hand right now), that the ER is not the full night-wisdom of the WTP because it posits a finite world (cf. Z "Of the Three Evils" 1). Compare:

"To attain the grade of Magus [which corresponds with Wisdom] he [the Magister Templi, which corresponds with Understanding] must accomplish [...] the renunciation of His enjoyment of the Infinite so that he may formulate Himself as the Finite[.]" (Aleister Crowley, "One Star in Sight".)

Nietzsche, not Crowley, is the Magus of our present Aeon, and his Word is not Thelema (Will), but—Aion, perhaps?

"Nietzsche's reading of aion in his early lectures on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks reveals that Plato's abstraction of aion from the world of becoming had already lost the fundamental sense of the Heraclitean saying, which was that the ever-living fire of time and becoming lives its life and dies its death like a living being." (Lukacher, op.cit., page 9-10.)

And all of yet another, and an addendum to it:

::

"Either there are wills to power and the sum of it is the world or it is the will to power and everything is it's element."

Well, I've always thought wills can accumulate or cancel each other out (they are vectors). In any case, until last year I also thought in terms of sum and elements. But I no longer think the world is simply the sum of all beings; I think it's more than the sum of its parts. Thus the translator of Nishitani's book writes:

"While neither Heidegger nor Nishitani makes this connection explicit, a little reflection on the two texts from 1929 makes clear that 'world' in On the Essence of Ground and 'nothing' in What is Metaphysics? are equivalent. According to the former text, a being can only make sense to us if we have already projected a horizon of intelligibility in the form of a world; we can encounter a being only insofar as we have already gone beyond ('transcended') it to an empty horizon, against which it can appear as not-nothing—that is, as something."

This is evident from WP 1067, which ironically is the last section of WP: we can really say that Heidegger begins where Nietzsche ends in this respect.

"And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: [...] enclosed by 'nothingness' [das Nichts, lit. "the nothing"] as by a boundary[.]"

Nietzsche's "world" as will to power is simply the sum vector, pointing back to its beginning, of all beings. His actual world, in the Heideggerian sense, is his mirror, that is, his mind's eye. In fact, I think that space, so-called "empty" space, is really nothing but mind (or rather, nothing and mind are one and the same)...

"The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws." (Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Architecture of Theories".)

Beings or things are just "kinks" in a "field", excitations (thoughts, ideas) of that field (thus Descartes's "cogito" literally means "I intensely agitate"; compare the etymology of "thinking", which means "causing to appear").



Addendum:

The usual translation of "noesis" is "thinking", by the way; not "understanding". I recently translated it into German as "Erkennen", "to (get to) know, to (re)cognise"[.]

Mitra-Sauwelios wrote:"It is interesting [...] that Heidegger did not inquire into the aporetic temporal character of khôra [in Plato's Sophist] but instead took a decidedly Parmenidean slant on its interpretation and related it to the khorismos or gap between Being and beings. In other words, instead of reading the strong indications in Plato that khôra is a material entity that lives eternally between Being and becoming, Heidegger de-realizes it as an existent being and reinvents it as a mere gap or notational spacing or interval [...]
Heidegger's natural tendency as a thinker runs so powerfully in the Parmenidean direction of thinking, not toward the interminable impurity of the difference, which is Nietzsche's obsession, but toward the purity and noncontamination of the duality of beings and Being, of their 'totally different' sites." (Lukacher, Time-Fetishes, page 21.)

Nietzsche realizes, or at least personifies, Life as a kind of entity that is, however, not just one among many beings: for example, Life speaks thus to Zarathustra:

"And even thou, discerning one, art only a path and footstep of my will: verily, my Will to Power walketh even on the feet of thy Will to Truth!" (Z, "Self-Surpassing".)

And at the end of NcW Epilogue, N suggests that the Truth is, as the Greeks named her, Baubo—that is, Vulva, countless folds or layers with a hole in the center... This is how I now understand art, the will to power as art:



All art is, first and foremost, the art of introduction...

This requires further elucidation or mystification. First, a Facebook post of mine from July 27:

1.

Here's from a book page I found perfectly randomly (I was googling the phrase "can still just"...). It's about a passage from Plato's Republic (spoken by Glaucon).

"These people's quest is for 'the smallest [musical] interval, by which measurement is to be made', a project which we discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Their procedure is to adjust the tensions of two strings until their pitches are so close together that any further adjustment would be heard as bringing them into unison; when that situation is reached, they suppose, the smallest diastêma has been found. It is thus to be identified by ear, not on the basis of any kind of argument; and it will therefore be the smallest that human hearing can detect, rather than being the smallest absolutely, in some theoretical sense. This is no doubt as it should be, since the crucial task is to locate an interval which harmonic scientists can pick out directly and use in practice as the unit of measurement.
All this makes sense of a sort, and it locates these theorists squarely in the empirical tradition to which Aristotle and Aristoxenus also refer. But there is one detail in Glaucon's depiction which marks it off from the others. Instead of representing the first group of these disputing investigators as saying that they can still just detect a gap or a space between the notes that the strings emit, he attributes to them the claim that they can still 'just hear a sound in the middle', where by 'in the middle' they must mean 'in between the notes in question'. Having said this, they add 'that this is the smallest interval, by which measurement should be made', where 'this' apparently refers to the sound just mentioned.
It seems very strange that they should be claiming to detect a sound (êchê) and not a gap, and if they are indeed identifying this sound itself as the 'smallest interval', that seems stranger still." (Andrew Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, page 425.)

And here's from a book I got by no means randomly, and which gave me my "spacelight" idea:

"It is interesting [...] that Heidegger did not inquire into the aporetic temporal character of khôra [in Plato's Sophist] but instead took a decidedly Parmenidean slant on its interpretation and related it to the khorismos or gap between Being and beings. In other words, instead of reading the strong indications in Plato that khôra is a material entity that lives eternally between Being and becoming, Heidegger de-realizes it as an existent being and reinvents it as a mere gap or notational spacing or interval[.]" (Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes, page 21.)

::

And second, the beginning of my main OkCupid profile (...), where I was banned three weeks ago for having multiple profiles:

2.

Nietzsche, early music, shrooms, co-op gaming, drama series, low-carb food, etc...

The above is just a quick summary for the app version of DoubleTake. But—why do I even reckon with that? For that won't do: that is not a proper introduction. Convenient as such "apps" may be, they can never replace the art of introduction—and all art is, first and foremost, the art of introduction...

This insight was just driven home to me by shrooms—by psychedelic truffles, more properly speaking. As usual, I drank my infusion at the beginning of my daily Holosync; but by the end of it, an hour later, I found myself deeply anxious between that technology and the lack thereof. My right brain side, that is to say the left half of my body, almost couldn't take it—and that, I realised only then with the proper "Aha!" experience, is the side where my heart is. My maternal grandmother, who was very dear to me, once told me she had a heart condition as a child, and since then I've always been mindful of that. And then I remembered: the song I'd had in my head, faintly, just a wisp, from the beginning of my Holosync: it was from Micrologus' D'Amor cantando! So I put on that album, and was immediately struck by the first track. Now that is a proper introduction! The introduction of a fifteenth-century Venetian nobleman perhaps,—I can only try to do it justice with words. An introduction with somewhat of a start, in the etymological sense, but not inducing a panic, but—at this point I'm struck by the etymology of "panic"... [https://www.etymonline.com/word/panic] An arrival of order, of an Ordering, arresting but at the same time excusing itself for that, but not really, a proper excuse, a vindication... Layer upon layer unfolds gentle-manly—if you will not deign to take shelter in the last layer, then maybe in the next? The next turns out to be even more wickedly personal, though—closer to the heart, the corde, of this Prince...



Ah, and then I didn't even come so far as to describe the lusty gallop that starts after all this! That, and the rest of my selection of the album, is really to my heart! I hope that it will be to yours as well...

Logically, it makes no difference whether the universe is expanding or everything in it is contracting. This realisation was actually anticipated by SpaceLight: all objects give "light" (give off radiation); but light and space are one; so all objects give off space, "evaporate" into space... Yes, we can say the universe is larger than when our fathers lived; but that's just the modern perspective. It's equally true that we are smaller than our fathers were (or at least not as much bigger as our better nutrition etc. would make us if other things were equal).

On a different note, but still on spacelight—and spacemind!—in a certain sense, here's something I wrote yesterday:

Being the radical conservative that I am,¹ I was more than skeptical about VR. But a skeptic is literally someone who looks on, who waits and sees; and in the case of VR, the saying goes that seeing is believing.

This is especially true of PSVR's first "killer app" (see below). Starting with Super Mario 64, I've never really enjoyed any of the 3D Super Mario platform games.² Astro Bot Rescue Mission, however, changes everything: this is what Super Mario 64 promised but failed to deliver, for the simple reason that the screen remained 2D and it was therefore impossible to estimate distances truly accurately. But VR requires the visually impaired to keep on their glasses or keep in their contacts: it really simulates distance.² I've enjoyed many "3D" games regardless of the problem indicated, but my best friend has basically skipped "3D" gaming entirely starting with the PSX/N64 generation, yet has compared Astro Bot to the leap from the Atari 2600 to his beloved NES. VR truly is the next dimension since Super Mario World perfected 2D gaming in 1990.

Easy Allies review of Astro Bot Rescue Mission

¹ "Nietzsche may seem to reveal himself as radically antirevolutionary or conservative beyond the wildest wishes of all other conservatives[.]" (Leo Strauss, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil".)

² Super Mario 3D Land on 3DS is by far the best of the bunch, followed at some distance by Super Mario 3D World on a 3D TV: these systems' screens really simulate distance, but only the former game was programmed with that in mind.

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VR is probably the closest you can get to something like skydiving in the comfort of your own home. If anything, you should try PSVR with Astro Bot. The above review comes closest to getting it across on a 2D screen. But as long as you haven't experienced it yourself, you really can't know what you're talking about. I can no longer play my favourite racing game, Dirt Rally, on a 2D screen: the suspension of disbelief is gone completely. This guy conveys it pretty well:

Jimmy Broadbent, "DiRT Rally - This Made Me Feel Genuine Fear | VR |"

Mitra-Sauwelios wrote:Below is a private message I wrote a month ago. I post it here because it contains the next step in spacelight.

[...] This "self-valuing logic" is actually an elaboration, and pretty much the perfection, of the non-political dimension of Nietzsche's teaching ("Zarathustra's night-wisdom"); it's also knowns as Value Ontology. It was first conceived by my best friend [...]. I think I've added to it, though, especially with my conception of what I call "spacelight". [...] As you can see, I've been tending away from First Philosophy [the non-political dimension of philosophy, metaphysics/cosmology] and toward political philosophy. This is my day wisdom. [...] I personally find much good in Heidegger as well. In fact, it was in great part he who made me see space is mind, and mind is space... Spacemind, then.

What I mean is I've been coming to "SL" from Zarathustra's day wisdom, the ER, whereas FC came to VO from Z's night wisdom, the WTP. In fact, SL is thinking through the ER from the WTP, or the WTP to the ER. Some new ideas:

"The double meaning of 'Oedipus'—'Know Where' and 'Swollen Foot'—has its counterpart in Odysseus's chosen name 'No one' [Outis], with its shadow 'Mind' [Mêtis], and his given name 'Anger'. If one adds the anger of Oedipus, the resemblance becomes uncanny. In the case of Oedipus, the solution to the riddle 'Why must he who solved the riddle of the Sphinx kill his father and marry his mother?' lay in the difference between species and genesis [cognate with "kin"!], for while Oedipus could figure out man in time he could not comprehend the end points of birth and death, at which the sacred, in the form of a divine prohibition at one end and a divine injunction at the other¹, intrudes on human life. Oedipus could not bring himself to will retroactively the conditions for what he claims to be, the outsider who is wholly devoted to the city [a tyrannos who is a true king (also co-gnate with "kin")]; for those conditions were patricide and incest, or the annihilation of the family on behalf of the city. The theoretical disposition of Oedipus, which showed up in his disregarding himself in discovering 'man' [i.e., in his being an absent-minded professor, so to say] was put in the service of a political end with which it had to be forced to fit. The force required for the fit was made manifest in Oedipus's anger. In the case of Odysseus, on the other hand, for whom the gods reserved the discovery of nature, he is fated to vindicate the family at the expense of much bloodshed in order that he may safely leave the kingdom in the hands of his son. That the fit between Odysseus the knower, however, and Odysseus the king is no less forced than in the case of Oedipus, the anger of Odysseus equally shows. Odysseus, who is 'No one' by mind, experiences what it means to be a nobody and demands the recognition due to a king. Odysseus in his own country duplicates what he is destined to do for Poseidon. Poseidon is to become known while he remains unknowable, and Odysseus [...] wants to be acknowledged to be, while concealed, what he would automatically be conceded to be were he to be revealed; but we do not know whether Odysseus can be revealed. Did not Helen indicate that he was transparent only to her?" (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: a Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, "Odysseus's Lies".)

¹ As soon as one is alive, one is prohibited from eating other people by the Homeric gods; and as soon as one is dead, the others are enjoined by them to bury one (so they shall not eat one!).

Mitra-Sauwelios wrote:Nietzsche's "world" as will to power is simply the sum vector, pointing back to its beginning, of all beings. His actual world, in the Heideggerian sense, is his mirror, that is, his mind's eye. In fact, I think that space, so-called "empty" space, is really nothing but mind (or rather, nothing and mind are one and the same)...

If everything in the universe is contracting, if all objects (including light, "photons": the light-year itself becomes smaller) evaporate into space, then a limit is approximated which would be nothing but space. This is what's called the heat death of the universe. The opposite, the limit that would symmetrically "precede" the Big Bang, would be the absolute absence of space, absolute "matter" (but matter as understood by post-modern science). What would this be? According to SL, space is mind, so the classical opposite would seem to be "body". Benardete, however, writes:

"[Circe's] enchantment consists of transforming a man into a pig, with its head, voices, bristles, and build, but the mind (noos) remains as it was before. [Odysseus's] knowledge, then, is the knowledge that the mind of man belongs together with his build. [...]
Odysseus's knowledge of nature does not go beyond the knowledge of man in general. It does not protect him against the possibility that if he sleeps with Circe she may unman him (anênor). A difference seems to be implied between the intelligible eidos of human being (athrôpos) and the visible species (eidos) of man (anêr) and woman (gunê)." (op.cit., "Odysseus's Own Story".)

The "build" of man is his eidos, or his Idea; and indeed those absolute limits are ideal, not real. But what Plato's "pure mind" does is give birth in beauty to the Idea of the Good. In order for the ER to occur according to Big Bang theory, the approximation of pure space must somehow give birth to the "deproximation" away from pure Idea. This approximation, however, is the extension of that "deproximation": ultimately both are one and the same process. What I'm attempting, then, is the cosmic form of the Oedipal complex, with regard to "fathering oneself".

"Helen and Menelaus notice the outward semblance of father and son ([Odyssey] 4.141-50), and Nestor sees the resemblance in his reasonable speeches (3.123-25)." (op.cit., "Pattern and Will".)

"Toward the re-emergence of the world.
From two negations emerges a position [Position] if the negations are forces. (There emerges darkness from light against light, cold from heat against heat, etc.)" (Nietzsche, workbook July-August 1882, entry 1 [51] whole.)

"Many suns circle in desert space: to all that is dark do they speak with their light—but to me they are silent.
Oh, this is the hostility of light to the shining one: unpityingly doth it pursue its course.
Unfair to the shining one in its innermost heart, cold to the suns:—thus travelleth every sun." (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, "The Night-Song", Common trans.)

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The "centers of force" of will to power can be understood as "self-valuings". A self-valuing is not a "self" that values, but a valuing of the very valuing that it is... This is circular, but only indirectly: for it values the valuing that it is in and only in valuing others who, in turn, value them in this same way. These are the others who alone one can have power over. (By "one" I mean, "you, a self-valuing".)

Power then, or more precisely willing to power, exists in letting other beings value you (in a very broad sense) so, that you are empowered in your valuing, which is what you are at bottom. And what is valuing?

"Valuing is creating: hear it, ye creating ones! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of the valued things.
Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, ye creating ones!" (Z, Common, "The Thousand and One Goals".)

Valuing something means creating value in it, for it means allowing it to fulfil its own most basic need as well: to value itself (the valuing that it is). It means allowing it to create value in you. To exchange value with you: that is what it wants—what it wills.

Valuing or valuation is the most "objective" value there is. In an abstract sense, "valuation" itself is invaluable (note: this means the opposite extreme of "not valuable"!). But in a concrete sense, it only begins with "some other self-valuings". Here, the opposite extreme of (presque) rien would be "all other self-valuings". This, however, can only happen indirectly; one can directly value only the self-valuings one actually encounters, of course... It is only by extension, if one values all of those, that one values all beings, directly or indirectly.

This is a Nietzschean approach. A Heideggerian approach would argue that one doesn't in the first place experience one's world as consisting of beings but as a space filled with stuff, some of which is closer to oneself than other stuff; and that one can value this space in its infinite or indefinite scope.

My own doctrine of "spacelight" entertains the idea that all beings are literally creating space all the time: they therefore become relatively ever smaller (but "their" space ever greater—this is the logical equivalent of the contemporary scientific consensus on universal expansion).

That consensus entails that the universe moves away from absolute fullness and toward absolute emptiness—both as asymptotes.

"The two most extreme modes of thought—the mechanistic and the Platonic—are reconciled in the eternal recurrence: both as ideals." (WP 1061.)

Could Nietzsche mean here that the Platonic "Form of the Good" would be absolute fullness?

"If, e.g., mechanistic theory cannot avoid the consequence, drawn from it by  William Thomson [First Baron Kelvin], of leading to a final state [0 degrees Kelvin, which could only exist in absolute vacuum], then the mechanistic theory stands refuted." (WP 1066.)

Platonism stands refuted inasmuch as it proposes an original state of complete stasis or staticity away from which the world "started" moving...

"In Plotinus's text, not only is time, famously, the moving image of eternity, but perhaps more interestingly eternity is conversely, and inseparably, the only barely moving, almost totally static, image of time." (Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: the Secret History of Eternal Recurrence, page 24.)

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"'In order that there might be any degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to—emerge: entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' (V 2, 11 [162]). What is called the unreal world of error here? Nietzsche's answer reads: 'entities with the belief in persisting things, in individuals etc.' On a cursory reading, one might think that what is unreal about this world of error be only the belief of the entities that populate it. But the entities are actually themselves that in which they believe, namely individuals, more precisely put: that which they call their Being organises itself through their will to be individuals. Life means self-assertion; life rests on the delusion that there were a self-identical Self, which can persevere through time, which can hold its own. Greek ontology calls that which perseveres as something identical through the change of an organic entity, its εἶδος, its form. This form is never purely realised. It never comes into full presence. But all the phases in the development of a living being may be designated as Becoming or Perishing, that is to say as degrees of approximating or moving away from the realisation of the form. Therefore the form has the character of the τέλος--the goal immanent in each living being. Greek ontology designates the self-identical τέλος as the true Being of each thing that moves. The designation of the τέλος as the Being of being suggests itself strongly when one considers that Becoming, that is, the transition into Being, is a process of approximating the immanent τέλος, and that Perishing, conversely, is a process of moving away from the immanent τέλος. But with the decline and eventual fall of metaphysics, the possibility of designating a non-sensual, never given entity as the true Being of the temporal vanishes as well. If the τέλος has no Being, then the only remaining alternative is to interpret it as a Non-Being that presents itself as a Being, that is, to interpret it as a semblance. Now it remains true, however, that all life is only made possible by the fact that an entity organises itself in the striving after such a unity. One cannot say that the τέλος were a man-made fiction. Every living being is in actual fact oriented towards an organising unity. Thus the semblance of the τέλος is a semblance brought forth by Nature itself. Semblance, or, as Nietzsche also puts it: error, is the condition of the possibility of life. The unreal world of error is thus no man-made fiction but the real world of living creatures. All living creatures whatsoever exist only through the belief in persisting things, that is to say through their striving after the organising unity of the τέλος. But that after which they strive never has a Being. Thus they only exist by virtue of error. The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself. Being torn between its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, for itself and out of itself, no existence: it exists only as it produces semblance out of itself, which however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a semblance. [... W]ithout semblance, the eternal flux has no existence. It must produce semblance out of itself. Semblance therefore belongs to its truth." (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 250-252.)

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Kosmodyssey: a Neo-Homeric Re-Writing of the Universe.

"Time at first—in reality before that 'first' was produced by desire of succession—Time lay, though not yet as Time, in the Authentic Existent together with the Kosmos itself; the Kosmos also was merged in the Authentic and motionless within it." (Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.11, trans. MacKenna.)

"[Odysseus] is fated to vindicate the family at the expense of much bloodshed in order that he may safely leave the kingdom in the hands of his son." (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: a Platonic Reading of the Odyssey.)

I suppose I should add something I wrote in between the last two posts.

Mitra-Sauwelios wrote:"Toward the re-emergence of the world.
From two negations emerges a position [Position] if the negations are forces. (There emerges darkness from light against light, cold from heat against heat, etc.)" (Nietzsche, workbook July-August 1882, entry 1 [51] whole.)

"Many suns circle in desert space: to all that is dark do they speak with their light—but to me they are silent.
Oh, this is the hostility of light to the shining one: unpityingly doth it pursue its course.
Unfair to the shining one in its innermost heart, cold to the suns:—thus travelleth every sun." (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, "The Night-Song", Common trans.)

::

Silence is to hearing as darkness is to sight. In other words, because Zarathustra is himself a sun, the other suns are dark to him.

[...]

The heat death of the universe means that the universe approaches (but only as an asymptote, a limit that can never be reached but only approximated) absolute darkness and cold. I was thinking absolute darkness and cold could again give birth to light and heat if confronted with another darkness and cold. What's certain is that, to absolute darkness and cold, another absolute darkness and cold would not be dark and cold—and therefore, relatively bright and warm, if formerly the former was not absolute... This means the absolute darkness and cold which our universe "approaches" becomes ever less dark and cold to it. Logically, it's the same limit as that "before" the Big Bang... The only thing missing for the ER according to current scientific consensus, then, is that the limit is actually reached.

you know, if you could work buber's i and thou concept into this idea that relationships are fundamentally valuings rather than interactions between 'things' - i imagine you would have to say that the only constant in the world of things is this valuing(s) - you might find some support for the theory that valuing beings are first and foremost intuitively aware of each other, rather than perceptually. this 'i and thou' idea comes across almost like another kind of 'sense' not deducible to perception alone.

If "Thou" is used in the context of an encounter with a human being, the human being is not He, She, or bound by anything. You do not experience the human being; rather you can only relate to him or her in the sacredness of the I-Thou relation. The I-Thou relationship cannot be explained; it simply is. Nothing can intervene in the I-Thou relationship. I-Thou is not a means to some object or goal, but a definitive relationship involving the whole being of each subject.

this mysterious datum of knowing without objectifying (person as body in space and time, etc.) could be thought of as an intuition that takes the form of valuing, not 'conceiving', as this would involve those categories of reason which spring into action to make sense of the perceptual things in the world. you see there that it's said 'you do not experience the human being'. what then is this feeling of 'bondedness', the identification with other valuers, if not an intuitive recognition of the fundamental, most constant, and simplest state of being qua being... a form taking 'valuing' in space/time as the 'human being'? rhetorical question (i'm just playing along here because there's nothing else to do). it seems to me this is what you're shooting for. you want to make of 'valuing' something that sustains itself even as the corporeal world changes... so much so that you could say it structures the very process of this change itself.

in any case you could make an appeal to this 'i and thou' concept for creating another kind 'knowing-of-value' which wouldn't be subjected to being stonewalled by the fact/value distinction in analytical philosophy. in a way, using this 'i and thou' approach would put moral sensibility on the same terms as wittgenstein had put it; something inevitably 'mystical' and not to be interrogated by positivistic correspondence theory criticism.

if you want the theory of 'valuing' to be steadfast, while at the same time being unable to put value statements into verifiable propositional form (e.g., 'this apple is good' has the superfluous predicate 'good'), you have to introduce a new way of knowing valuing/valuers that is impervious to such criticism. buber just might be the man you're looking for (and you can usually trust a man with a beard like that).

Interesting, and well said. I'm not afraid of the self-valuing logic's being stonewalled by the fact/value distinction, though; for, as Strauss pointed out, that distinction is itself a value distinction, not a factual distinction... For ultimately, "factual" "knowledge" comes down to things like "what do I consider justified belief?" (not to mention true belief, for "true" is at bottom a repetition of the defined—knowledge—; unless it be in the sense of a "true believer", someone who truly believes—but this, too, begs a value question: "how strong must a belief be to be 'true belief'?").

https://www.etymonline.com/word/believe

A quick update. On January 8, I wrote:

This is the secret essence of Nietzsche's infamous "will to power": self-valuing through other-valuing. Our innermost essence is valuing, appreciating,—loving. And what we love most, the only thing we love at bottom, is being loved: being loved for what we are, namely for our love, for the loving that we do. The suggestion is that this goes for all beings...

This is also what Plato really meant. Platonic love is really Platonic eros... What's Platonic about it is that it's not just what's usually understood by "eroticism"; far from it. Eros is very simply the longing to close a distance: to get closer, close, as close as possible to what is, in a crucial respect, above us. [...] Light, as I understand it, is what happens when a distance is closed, when a space dissolves.

Now in his "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero", Strauss writes:

"Xenophon did not even attempt to obliterate the distinction between the best tyrant and the king because he appreciated too well the charms, nay, the blessings of legitimacy. He expressed this appreciation by subscribing to the maxim (which must be reasonably understood and applied) that the just is identical with the legal." (Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, page 101.)

What is it that legitimises? It may seem that Strauss, the great champion of natural right and natural law, is saying here that whatever is positively legal—i.e., in accordance with any positive law whatsoever, no matter who posited it or why—is just. But he does give some concrete shape to the phrase "reasonably understood and applied" in the essay:

"[U]nder certain conditions Caesarism is necessary and hence legitimate." (op.cit., page 98.)

In the last analysis, it's necessity which legitimises. But this means all nature as understood by philosophy in the strict sense, is legitimate!:

"Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things. It presupposes then that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History. It presupposes, in other words, that any 'realm of freedom' is not more than a dependent province within the 'realm of necessity'. It presupposes, in the words of Kojève, that 'Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself'." (Strauss, "Restatement", restored final paragraph.)

If there is a "realm of freedom" that is more than a dependent province within the "realm of necessity", however, there is an even higher legitimisation than necessity:

"[Ι]s not the necessary essentially inferior to the noble or to what is choiceworthy for its own sake? Necessity excuses: what is justified by necessity is in need of excuse. The Caesar, as Voegelin conceives of him, is 'the avenger of the misdeeds of a corrupt people'. Caesarism is then essentially related to a corrupt people, to a low level of political life, to a decline of society. It presupposes the decline, if not the extinction, of civic virtue or of public spirit, and it necessarily perpetuates that condition. Caesarism belongs to a degraded society, and it thrives on its degradation. Caesarism is just, whereas tyranny is unjust. But Caesarism is just in the way in which deserved punishment is just. It is as little choiceworthy for its own sake as is deserved punishment. Cato refused to see what his time demanded because he saw too clearly the degraded and degrading character of what his time demanded. It is much more important to realize the low level of Caesarism (for, to repeat, Caesarism cannot be divorced from the society which deserves Caesarism) than to realize that under certain conditions Caesarism is necessary and hence legitimate." (op.cit., pp. 97-98.)

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This concludes my first session for writing this update, which has turned out not to be so quick at all. I stopped here because I still had to think some things through. For example, the word "choiceworthy" need not imply that there is any choice: it means that, if there should be a choice, the matter in question is worthy of it.

Another point: if there is no "realm of freedom" that is more than a dependent province within the "realm of necessity", nothing, or everything, is tyranny:

"Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation: but 'nature's conformity to law', of which you physicists talk so proudly as though—why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad 'philology'. It is no matter of fact, no 'text', but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! 'Everywhere equality before the law; nature is no different in that respect, no better off than we are'—a fine instance of ulterior motivation, in which the plebian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic as well as a second and more refined atheism are disguised once more. 'Ni Dieu, ni maître' ["neither God nor master"]—that is what you, too, want; and therefore 'cheers for the law of nature!'—is it not so? But as said above, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same 'nature' and with regard to the same phenomena rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power—an interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all 'will to power' so vividly that almost every word, even the word 'tyranny' itself, would eventually sound unsuitable, or a weakening and attenuating metaphor—being too human—but he might, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a 'necessary' and 'calculable' course, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment." (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 22, Zimmern trans.)

And with these two considerations, that there may be no freedom and there need not be for there to be choiceworthiness, I return to my "Nietzsche's 'The Greek State revisited":

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=171667

The essential part is my discussion of paragraphs 3-5. There, I translated and posted a long, full passage from Nietzsche's workbooks, which I will reproduce here in amended form:

"What is the beautiful?—a pleasure-experience that hides the actual intentions that the will has in an appearance from us. Now by what is the pleasure-experience aroused? Objectively: the beautiful is a smiling of Nature, an excess of strength and of pleasure-feeling of existence: one should think of plants. It is the damsel's-body of the Sphinx. The aim of the beautiful is to seduce to existence. Now what is that smiling, that seductiveness, actually? Negatively: the concealing of distress, the smoothing-away of all folds, and the cheerful soul-glance of the thing.
'See Helen in every woman' the lust for existence conceals the unbeautiful. Negation of distress, either true or seeming negation of distress is the beautiful. The sound of one's native tongue in a strange land is beautiful. Even the worst piece of music can be experienced as beautiful in comparison with adverse howling, whereas it is experienced as ugly when contrasted with other pieces of music. Thus it is with the beauty of plants etc. as well. The need for the negation of distress and the semblance of such a negation must meet halfway.
Now in what does this semblance consist? Impetuousness, lust, crowding, distorted stretching-out are not allowed to be noticeable. The actual question is: how is this possible? What with the terrible nature of the will? Only by means of a representation, subjectively: by means of a delusional image shoved in between, which gives the pretence of the success of the lustful world-will; the beautiful is a happy dream on the countenance of an entity whose features now smile in hope. With this dream, this anticipation in his head does Faust see 'Helen' in every woman. We find, then, that the individual will also can dream, can anticipate, has representations and fantasy-images. The aim of Nature in this beautiful smiling of that will's appearances is the seduction of other individuals to existence. The plant is the beautiful world of the animal, the whole world that of man, the genius [is] the beautiful world of the primordial will itself. The creations of art are the supreme pleasure-goal of the will.
Every Greek statue can teach that the beautiful is only negation.—The supreme enjoyment does the will have at the Dionysian tragedy, because here even the terror-visage of existence stimulates to living-on by means of ecstatic excitations." (Nietzsche, workbook End 1870-April 1871 7 [27] whole.)

The word I've translated as "distress" is Not (Noth in Nietzsche's nineteenth-century German)—etymologically "need", and also literally, in expressions such as "a friend in need" and "a case of need". (The word I translated as "need" is Bedürfnis, more literally "requirement"—though the closeness of the two words can be seen in the word Not(h)durft (which used to mean "basic needs" in general but now only still means "excretion"...).) A Not(h)fall, a case of need, is an emergency; it was in emergency conditions that even the Republican Romans reverted from their two-consul system to a single dictator (one who dictates), for a maximum of six months. The necessity that legitimates Caesarism is the severity of conditions in which Caesar became dictator for life. In one word, distress.



From here I will leap to Daniel Conway's insights on Nietzsche and the political. Mihi ipsi scribo!...

"In their private pursuits of self-perfection, exemplary human beings inadvertently produce themselves as works of art for public reception. This self-creation has the (unintended) effect on its witnesses of transfiguring—and thus redeeming—the suffering attendant to the ascetic practices deployed in self-experimentation. [...] The enduring erotic appeal of exemplary human beings thus derives from their power to transfigure, and thereby render meaningful, the otherwise meaningless suffering required by the ascetic ideal. The palpable suffering induced by the philosopher's self-inflicted cruelty is consequently redeemed by the incarnate work of art he becomes in the eyes of his beholders. [...] In the eyes of their witnesses, exemplary figures redeem their own suffering, which in turn emboldens these witnesses to attempt painful self-overcomings of their own. [...] Erôs arises in response to the gulf that separates the exemplary human being from all others, and it naturally aspires to bridge this gulf. [...]
Inspired to unimagined heights by the madness of erôs, the bewinged lover becomes acquainted with various perfections resident within his own soul, which perfections he temporarily shares in common with his beloved. [...] Only when engulfed in the madness of erôs would human beings ever attempt to overcome or transcend their natural limitations." (Conway, "Love's labor's lost: the philosopher's Versucherkunst".)

Note the word "redeem". The erotic attraction of the ascetic lies in his apparent power or freedom—freedom from pain, for example:

"He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but at the fact that he feels no pain where he had expected to feel it. A parable." (BGE 124 whole.)

Now the final paragraph of Conway's essay is especially interesting in the context of spacelight:

"The advent of the 'last will of humankind', the will to nothingness, marks the critical point of exhaustion at which the enervated will is no longer capable of awakening erôs, the point at which the pathos of distance vanishes altogether. The advanced decay of late modernity thus signifies a state of affective entropy, a disgregation of the will into quanta so discrete that they can no longer generate the erôs needed to sustain the ethical life of the community (CW 7). A dissipation of will would result in the irrecuperable desuetude of erôs, and a cessation of erôs would nullify the temptations of the Versucherkunst. The decadence that besets late modernity thus comprises an assault on beauty itself, as potential objects of erotic attraction are systematically debased. Indeed, if it were no longer possible to 'attach one's heart' to a great human being, in whom one sees reflected one's own prospects for self-perfection, then one would have no means of redeeming one's hatred of oneself. The future of humankind as a whole would no longer be warranted, and the teachings of Silenus would become wisdom once again."

This is basically the microcosmic form of the heat death of the universe.

Most people want to feel morally superior to Nietzsche and his "form" of power, but this is itself only further confirmation of his theory.

"[...] that instinct of freedom (spoken in my language: the will to power) [...] (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, second treatise, section 18.)

Power is freedom and freedom is power. That is to say, when we're free from something, that thing has no power over us; but in order to have power over something ourselves, we must not just have freedom from certain matters, but also freedom for certain matters (compare Zarathustra, "The Way of the Creating one"). Not only must we be free from, or mightier than, whatever may stand in our way; but we must also be able to bridge the distance. Even if there be only empty space (vacuum) between ourselves and our goal, we can still move no faster than light; so if we are more than, say, one hundred light-years removed from our goal, how could we ever reach it?

Hence my thesis: space is the show-freedom of bodies. Every body is a light source (even though most light is invisible to humans: infrared, ultraviolet, etc.), and indeed I mean "show-freedom" in a dual sense: the apparent freedom to give light. In truth we give off space all the time, whether we want to or no; ever more space emerges, all bodies become relatively smaller all the time. Space is light that has not yet given light, given off energy; as soon as it's done this it's gone, no longer light but part of a body. This body "in turn" (really at the same time) gives off space, "radiation". When we see light, this means the space between us and the light source has been reduced to zero: for the space between us and the sun this takes approximately eight minutes, but in the meantime the sun also adds a (more or less) equal amount of space: it is thence that we do not scorch our eyes...

Will is nothing else than the feeling of free will, that is to say of power (every feeling of freedom is a feeling of free will)... And to have a will to something means to value it: when I have a will to something, I ultimately value it for the feeling of freedom or power it gives me (directly or indirectly). But beings, bodies, are nothing else than will to power or, as has been said, valuing; to be is to value, and what is valued are other valuings—not in themselves, but because they in turn again value us, the valuings that we are... Thus all beings, all valuings, are self-valuings: not because they value some abstract "Self" or other, but because they are valuings of the very valuings they themselves are... Indirectly, through other valuings.

"Valuing is creating: hear it, ye creating ones! Valuing is the treasure and the jewel of all the valued things.
Only through valuing is there value: and without valuing, the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, ye creating ones!" (Zarathustra, "Thousand Goals and One".)

The one goal is total freedom, the point at which the universe just consists of space anymore and all bodies are infinitesimal, and therefore negligible... This the heat death of the universe. The question is: will the cosmic Dionysus be born again?

"[...] time and the world of becoming as the gift of the One, of 'That which gives forth [dídosi] and never takes'. But what can this gift be in its originary state but the coming to presence of time and matter? The immensity of this gift is what makes Its Beauty absolute. It would appear that the World Soul returns eternally only by virtue of the fact that, in each cycle, the One gives Its gift absolutely, without hope of return. Every time the cycle of becoming reaches its endpoint, there is another gift, or more precisely, the return of the same gift. And each time it is only because the gift is pure and absolute that there can be the eternal contamination that is the coming to presence of a cosmos. This pure gift takes the form of a circle, but does so only inadvertently; only by giving a gift outside of the circle of exchange is the circle achieved." (Ned Lukacher, Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence, page 27.)

The term "spacelight" is misleading, for in order to be synonymous with "spacetime" it would have to be called "lighttime". However, I think "spacelight" sounds better—and a philosopher is perhaps no more—and no less—than a poetic scientist?

In order to be synonymous with Heidegger's book title Being and Time, the title of this post would have to be "Space and Time". For in my view, Being is nothing else than space, in the sense of emptiness, vacuum. In other words, Nothingness...

"While neither Heidegger nor Nishitani makes this connection explicit, a little reflection on the two texts from 1929 makes clear that 'world' in On the Essence of Ground and 'nothing' in What is Metaphysics? are equivalent. According to the former text, a being can only make sense to us if we have already projected a horizon of intelligibility in the form of a world; we can encounter a being only insofar as we have already gone beyond ('transcended') it to an empty horizon, against which it can appear as not-nothing—that is, as something." (Graham Parkes, note 25 to chapter 8 of his translation of Nishitani Keiji's The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (page 225). Heidegger says in Being and Time that Being "is" not itself a being; this already makes it logically equivalent to Nothingness.)

My thesis is basically that all beings (and in this regard, I'm the La Mettrie to Heidegger's Descartes...) project such a horizon of intelligibility, and thereby "give space" (compare "to give light"): this is then the reason that ever more space has emerged since the Big Bang. So we can also call my idea the idea of spacemind.—

::

I have this idea called spacelight ("schijnvrijheid"): those beings who self-value best, at the same time create space (distance) and attract by giving light (radiation). This goes at the physical level, but also at the emotional and the mental ("geestelijk"). Self-valuing best means being the best at obeying/co-commanding some irrational set of customs thanks to which and in spite of which a certain vibration has endured thus far. The older the pattern, the greater and nobler the self-valuing.

1.

I was born four days later than I was calculated, and the times my mother told me this during my youth, I got the impression that I had chosen to do that to a certain extent. And recently, as I lay in bed thinking about my spacelight theory, I suddenly realised that that was then the first time I took show-liberty in one specific sense. Let me elaborate by the hand of different examples.

When I "have to" go to bed, or to get up, I easily give myself too much timespace. I am very much used to having lots of timespace—my whole life is attuned to this, with night shifts (which ensure that I only have to work two-thirds of about full-time), a lot of time between my getting up and going to work, a lot of time to myself—at work, too, for night shifts are usually quiet—, etc. Even though I currently live in the most densely populated few square miles on Earth, I get disturbed by the modern world as little as possible. (Note that I am an introvert, so I'm more sensitive to that kind of thing (also a Highly Sensitive Person, if that's a thing (sigh, and enneagram type 5, avaricious—with time and energy, in this case). On the other hand, I have a pretty strict weekly regimen. For I have learned that, if I grant myself too much liberty from that, this revenges itself and the result is that I embrace what I "should" do with both arms again. Sometimes this can be for the better, when for example my regimen has become too much routine and I've lost the pleasure in it a little.

This last bit is an example of what Heraclitus says: "Sickness makes health agreeable and good, hunger satiety, fatigue rest." (Fragment 11.) Ha, Heraclitus, "the Obscure", whom Strauss cites so deliciously implicitly in his "Origin of the Idea of Natural Right" (in Natural Right and History)! As if Heraclitus' logos is rationality itself...

"It is often remarked that, while the prephilosophic term for the whole is 'heaven and earth', the philosophers call it kosmos, an ordered composite whose structure is intelligible only to the mind but is not apparent to the eye, which cannot go beyond its two most conspicuous parts. There is 'day and night', and there is 'day', which comprehends both day and night and can no longer be seen. Heraclitus uses it as an example of what Hesiod did not know, for day and night are one (fr. 57). The unity that logos discovers can be sounded but never without ambiguity, for day and night are still two. 'The way up and the way down are one and the same', Heraclitus says (fr. 60), but there are still two contrary ways, and one has to go one way or the other, even while one knows they are one. It now seems that Homer was the first, as far as we know, to have come to an understanding of this philosophic principle, to which he gave the name 'nature'." (Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, pp.86-87.)

2.

After I wrote part 1, I had the insight that there are two show-liberties in the sense of this thread: the way down and the way up. The way down I have pointed out in part 1—basically the liberal conception of freedom. The other is the Nietzschean conception:

"The philosophers' science of morals claimed to have discovered the foundation of morals either in nature or in reason. Apart from all the other defects of that pretended science it rests on the gratuitous assumption that morality must or can be natural (according to nature) or rational. Yet every morality is based on some tyranny against nature as well as against reason. Nietzsche directs his criticism especially against the anarchists who oppose every subjection to arbitrary laws: everything of value, every freedom[!] arises from a compulsion of long duration that was exerted by arbitrary, unreasonable laws; it was that compulsion that has educated the mind to freedom. Over against the ruinous permissiveness of anarchism Nietzsche asserts that precisely long lasting obedience to unnatural and unreasonable nomoi is 'the moral imperative of nature'. Physis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay, opposition of physis and nomos." (Strauss, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, paragraph 21. The quote is from BGE 188.)

I now understand this better than ever before. Physis is ultimately the universe, the Whole, Nothingness... In order not to fall back into that, nomoi are necessary, laws or habits (noteworthy by the way that Strauss leaves "things of value" and "freedoms" as possible synonyms).

The only sense in which nomoi aren't arbitrary is that they are naturally selected: my nomoi are the habits by virtue of which I have survived thus far (not to mention my genes): in spite of the bad ones and thanks to the good ones.—

"My" values are the values that sustain the valuing that "I" am. They change with my circumstances, until they can no longer keep up with them—which is when I cease to exist. In determining those values, I'm led by my feeling of freedom.