…We and our thoughts… Are we their parents? Are they our masters?…
Welcome to the world beyond! “Beyond” not in the sense of being on the other side of the river Eridanos; in fact, we are all on the same side, virtually living together, like the Wizards and the Muggles in Harry Potter’s world, and yet they are beyond our grasp and frequently comprehension, while we are... under their invisible spell. Here is Nietzsche entering their mystical realm with nothing short of Siegfried’s fearlessness:
“That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious, or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection, and in relationship with each other; that however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they, nevertheless, belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent -- is betrayed, in the end, also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell they are always revolving once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical, or systematic, wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other, to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is far less a discovery, than a recognition, remembering, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally. Philosophizing is, to this extent, a kind of atavism of the highest order.” (From Nietzsche’s Jenseits: 20)
This whole paragraph is so much filled with mysticism, the eerie and adamantly paranormal world beyond, that it instantly brings to mind that monstrosity of a thought that thinks by itself, where we thinkers are just the host, whose bodies are snatched by these creepy creatures. Kant (whose synthetic aprioris must certainly have influenced Nietzsche’s thinking in the passage above) ought to have increased his famous count of the Undinge from two to three: time, space, and thought!
The reader may have guessed that the purpose of this entry is not to marvel at Nietzsche’s deep mysticism (even though I do recognize mysticism as a highly commendable quality), but to observe that in the quoted passage Nietzsche comes as close to the purest spirit of religious idealism (in the sense of the independent, spiritual, Divine origin of thinking) as nobody has ever come, on that same elevated, intellectually superior level. Paraphrasing John 1:1, In the beginning was the Mysterious Commonwealth of Concepts, and this Commonwealth was with God, and it was God... When Nietzsche points out that thinking is "less a discovery than a recognition, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally," the “soul” he is referring to, cannot be some particular thinker’s individual soul, but the common soul, or the protosoul of all humanity, which could just as well be a good definition (one of them, of course) of God the Supreme Spirit.
By the way, what is the relationship between thought and Logos? Are they two autonomies under one Deity, or is one somehow subservient, somehow derivative, in relation to the other? Is Logos God’s thought? Or is Logos God Himself? Furthermore, is human thought a product of Logos, partially corrupted by freedom, the peculiar result of Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge? There are a veritable host of fertile little thoughtlets, fiercely competing with each other for a place under the sun, and I am not referring to the combined thoughts of all mankind. Such thoughtlets inhabit a single mind, a thinking mind… In fact, just as in mathematics, the illusory difference between micro-infinity, ¥, and macro-infinity, ¥*¥, is virtually non-discernable (¥=¥*¥), we cannot even fathom the technical difference between micro-thinking and macro-thinking. Nietzsche gives us the best approximation of religious idealism, again, when he observes that even our own thoughts exist independently from our control, in a realm that exists around us and in us, where we, however, are forbidden to enter...
(This subject will continue in my entry When I think That I Think…, to be posted later…)
Welcome to the world beyond! “Beyond” not in the sense of being on the other side of the river Eridanos; in fact, we are all on the same side, virtually living together, like the Wizards and the Muggles in Harry Potter’s world, and yet they are beyond our grasp and frequently comprehension, while we are... under their invisible spell. Here is Nietzsche entering their mystical realm with nothing short of Siegfried’s fearlessness:
“That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious, or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection, and in relationship with each other; that however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they, nevertheless, belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent -- is betrayed, in the end, also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell they are always revolving once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical, or systematic, wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other, to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is far less a discovery, than a recognition, remembering, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally. Philosophizing is, to this extent, a kind of atavism of the highest order.” (From Nietzsche’s Jenseits: 20)
This whole paragraph is so much filled with mysticism, the eerie and adamantly paranormal world beyond, that it instantly brings to mind that monstrosity of a thought that thinks by itself, where we thinkers are just the host, whose bodies are snatched by these creepy creatures. Kant (whose synthetic aprioris must certainly have influenced Nietzsche’s thinking in the passage above) ought to have increased his famous count of the Undinge from two to three: time, space, and thought!
The reader may have guessed that the purpose of this entry is not to marvel at Nietzsche’s deep mysticism (even though I do recognize mysticism as a highly commendable quality), but to observe that in the quoted passage Nietzsche comes as close to the purest spirit of religious idealism (in the sense of the independent, spiritual, Divine origin of thinking) as nobody has ever come, on that same elevated, intellectually superior level. Paraphrasing John 1:1, In the beginning was the Mysterious Commonwealth of Concepts, and this Commonwealth was with God, and it was God... When Nietzsche points out that thinking is "less a discovery than a recognition, a return to a remote household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally," the “soul” he is referring to, cannot be some particular thinker’s individual soul, but the common soul, or the protosoul of all humanity, which could just as well be a good definition (one of them, of course) of God the Supreme Spirit.
By the way, what is the relationship between thought and Logos? Are they two autonomies under one Deity, or is one somehow subservient, somehow derivative, in relation to the other? Is Logos God’s thought? Or is Logos God Himself? Furthermore, is human thought a product of Logos, partially corrupted by freedom, the peculiar result of Adam and Eve’s eating from the Tree of Knowledge? There are a veritable host of fertile little thoughtlets, fiercely competing with each other for a place under the sun, and I am not referring to the combined thoughts of all mankind. Such thoughtlets inhabit a single mind, a thinking mind… In fact, just as in mathematics, the illusory difference between micro-infinity, ¥, and macro-infinity, ¥*¥, is virtually non-discernable (¥=¥*¥), we cannot even fathom the technical difference between micro-thinking and macro-thinking. Nietzsche gives us the best approximation of religious idealism, again, when he observes that even our own thoughts exist independently from our control, in a realm that exists around us and in us, where we, however, are forbidden to enter...
(This subject will continue in my entry When I think That I Think…, to be posted later…)
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