PAINPANG.COM: 3 GREAT ILLUSIONS

THREE PLANES OF ILLUSION

FROM THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:

"It is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiate will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. (1) One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; (2) another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; (3) still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand. These three planes of illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly formed natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded by exquisite stimulants into forgetfulness of their sorrow. All that we call culture is made up of these stimulants; and, according to the proportion of the ingredients, we have either a dominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture: or, if historical exemplifications are wanted, there is either an Alexandrian or Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture.

"Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and laboring in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our educational methods have originally this ideal in view: every other form of existence must struggle on wearisomely beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended. In an almost alarming manner the cultured man was for a long time found only in the form of the scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced to evolve from learned imitations, and in the main effect, that of rhyme, we still recognize the origin of our poetic form from artistic experiments with a non-indigenous, thoroughly learned language. How unintelligible must Faust, the modern cultured man, who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a true Greek — Faust, storming unsatisfied through all the faculties, devoted to magic and the devil from a desire for knowledge; Faust, whom we have but to place beside Socrates for the purpose of comparison, in order to see that modern man is beginning to divine the limits of this Socratic love of perception and yearns for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said to Eckermann with reference to Napoleon: 'Yes, my good friend, there is also a productiveness of deeds,' he reminded us in a charmingly naïve manner that the non-theorist is something incredible and astounding to modern man; so that we again have need of the wisdom of Goethe to discover that such a surprising form of existence is not only comprehensible, but even pardonable.

"Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is concealed at the heart of this Socratic culture: Optimism, with its delusion of limitless power!* Well, we must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen—if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble with wanton agitations and desires, if the belief in the earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possibility of such a general intellectual culture is gradually transformed into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly happiness, into the conjuring up of a Euripidean deus ex machina.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Sidebar A:

deus ex machina [Latin, "god from a machine"] 1. in ancient Greek and Roman plays, a deity brought in by stage machinery to intervene in the action, 2. any unconvincing character or event brought artificially into the plot of a story, play, etc. to settle an involved situation, 3. anyone who unexpectedly intervenes to change the course of events.

Sidebar B:

"There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now.... Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead."

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon, quoted in Minds and Machines, edited by Alan Ross Anderson for "Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy Series," 1964.

Sidebar C:

Double-Speak:

Truth vs. Propaganda... or Truth = Propaganda?

Q & A... reward & punishment...

The System

The Machine

Q & A... reward & punishment... Q & A...

Truth About Manipulation

"What is your manipulation is my explanation and education.

Manipulation, like truth, is in the eye of the beholder."

(optimistic mantra of political image

consultant and marketeer)

MOTTO:

A clear scientific consensus says you can trust us.

Sidebar D: [More on Nietzsche's single startling statement about the general delusion of optimism.]

"... Optimism, with its delusion of limitless power!" —Nietzsche

Nothing is Impossible —Christopher Reeve

* ETERNAL OPTIMISTS ALL (beautiful dreamers, wishful thinkers, believers, liers and so on). This delusion of limitless power refered to by Nietzsche can be traced to every form of optimism. For every form of optimism can be said to momentarily echo a joyous faith in some sense of eternal life —the Eternal— no matter how irreligious, irreverent, intuitive, inexplicable, unconscious or irrational this sense may appear. Secular man can easily say every religious faith fosters this delusion of limitless power. But in much the same way, every secular faith or philosophy that succeeds in breeding and sustaining some form of optimism can only succeed by fostering this same delusion. Illusions of infinite life, daydreams of infinite power, exist moment-to-moment undefeated and happily populate every mundane twinkling of life. The mind drinks it all in every chance it gets, most of the time without appearing at all to be drunk or impaired. Consciousness everywhere is flying on a wing and a prayer, floating on everday dreams of the Infinite... to get by. The will to power, secular or religious, cannot help but dream of unlimited power in the background, even while trying to define realistic limits and set realistic goals. Every supposedly insignificant wrinkle of this impetuous will in even the very least of us sounds and summons the will to Power, the Infinite, the Eternal. Whether true or false; we cannot, will not say. Optimism's secret muse of limitless power draws strength from every breath we take. Hope —everywhere twinkling with life— is the will to power. It is ordinary man's deceptively ordinary reverie of the extraordinary. Man is a natural dreamer... Man is an eternal dreamer... dreaming of the Eternal.

—Painpang.com