from Google AI:
Alchemy was an ancient philosophical and protoscientific tradition, originating in China, India, and Greco-Roman Egypt, aiming to transmute base metals into gold, find an elixir for eternal life (Elixir of Life), and discover the Philosopher's Stone, evolving into modern chemistry and pharmacology while also being used metaphorically for magical transformations. Key concepts included separating elements into basic components (mercury and sulfur) to recombine them, using alchemical symbols for elements and processes, and working through stages like nigredo (blackening) and albedo (whitening).
---
“The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”
- Isaiah Berlin, "The Proper Study of Mankind"
---
"...and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called, 'Love'"
- Plato "Symposium" (Aristophanes' Speech)
PS- People will never all love the same 'Whole/ Goods' (Alchemical Quantity transforming into Quality)
Religion doesn't require a God. It simply requires a Love. A Philo-Soph. It's a Generation from Opposites. The negation of the negation is a "forgetting" of the preceding dialectical process of synthesis. "Suffering" (Love yet unobtsained0 is the gap between a thesis and its' antithesis. Sisyphus unhappy suffers G_d is merely an anthropomorphized focus on the transcendent ideal (good).
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering; such a senselessness, however, existed neither in Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naïve ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in suffering from the standpoint of the spectator, or the inflictor of the suffering. In order to get the secret, undiscovered, and unwitnessed suffering out of the world it was almost compulsory to invent gods and a hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something which wanders even among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes a point of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle. It was with the help of such inventions that life got to learn the tour de force, which has become part of its stock-in-trade, the tour de force of self-justification, of the justification of evil; nowadays this would perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance, life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is justified in the sight of which a god finds edification," so rang the logic of primitive sentiment—and, indeed, was it only of primitive? The gods conceived as friends of spectacles of cruelty—oh, how far does this primeval conception extend even nowadays into our European civilisation! One would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther and Calvin. It is at any rate certain that even the Greeks knew no more piquant seasoning for the happiness of their gods than the joys of cruelty. What, do you think, was the mood with which Homer makes his gods look down upon the fates of men? What final meaning have at bottom the Trojan War and similar tragic horrors? It is impossible to entertain any doubt on the point: they were intended as festival games for the gods, and, in so far as the poet is of a more godlike breed than other men, as festival games also for the poets. It was in just this spirit and no other, that at a later date the moral philosophers of Greece conceived the eyes of God as still looking down on the moral struggle, the heroism, and the self-torture of the virtuous; the Heracles of duty was on a stage, and was conscious of the fact; virtue without witnesses was something quite unthinkable for this nation of actors. Must not that philosophic invention, so audacious and so fatal, which was then absolutely new to Europe, the invention of "free will," of the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil, simply have been made for the specific purpose of justifying the idea, that the interest of the gods in humanity and human virtue was inexhaustible?
-Nietzsche, "Genealogy of Morals (2nd Essay)
No comments:
Post a Comment