Asylum For Blood-Feuds-Affected Person -- Lawyer Recommandation

[happy accident]

In Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the news of God's death in the mouth of a madman. People take no notice of him -- yet the image is striking: he carries a lantern in the morning, searching everywhere for God who cannot be found.

We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Realizing that no one believes him, the madman considers the bystanders: "I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still traveling; it has not yet reached the ears of men... This deed os still more distant from them than the most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves." Later that day, he visits the churches in the town and sings a requiem aeternam deo. "What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

[saysesame]

There are several forms of reincarnation in many Hindu religions. In Buddhism too, a person is born and reborn dozens of times until he learns to master his emotions and desires. Life is believed to be for the purpose of overcoming the desires of the body. Through a series of births and deaths a person finally achieves Nirvana, when the cycle of births and deaths ends, and one is born no more. Nirvana is supposed to be a state of bliss where one has reached the state beyond birth and death. In some Hindu religions, one can be reborn as an animal, an insect, a worm... etc. One Indian saint told his disciples that he would come as a rat in the next life. There is an Indian temple in his honor where they still continue to feed and protect rats of the neighborhood daily for fear that one of them might be the reincarnation of that saint. There is another Hindu god, Hanuman, who was incarnated as a monkey in his last appearance. They have a temple for him too, where they feed monkeys daily, protect and care for them in the environs of the temple.

That is a good thing I guess -- it encourages people to treat other animals with respect!

Are you being sarcastic? If that's the case, I seriously urge you to reconsider your position, attitude and words!

Hahaha - you're so funny, in lieu of!

[le mains sales]

In Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the news of God's death in the mouth of a madman. People take no notice of him -- yet the image is striking: he carries a lantern in the morning, searching everywhere for God who cannot be found.

We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Realizing that no one believes him, the madman considers the bystanders: "I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still traveling; it has not yet reached the ears of men... This deed os still more distant from them than the most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves." Later that day, he visits the churches in the town and sings a requiem aeternam deo. "What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

Excuse my naïvité, but what does the bike stand for?

[cosinger]

A virtuous (i.e. good) person is praised by others for the good he does to them. The virtues -- obedience, chastity, justness, industriousness, etc. -- will actually harm the person who possesses them! If you possess a virtue... you are its victim! Thus we praise virtue in others because we derive advantages from it.

And as far as moral beliefs are concerned, they are always group beliefs, and the group is greater than any dissenting individual. With morality, the individual can only ascribe value to himself as a function of the mass. Moral censure and control can only emerge through social consensus. Morality is thus the herd-instinct in the individual. It represents the power of those who are individually weak but collectively strong. Their moral laws will (they hope) protect them, as well as justify them and the way they live.

It is difficult for people to accept that human nature might be aggressive to the point of being called "evil." The introduction of the death drive has some fundamental implications not only for drive theory, but also for the psychoanalytic view of culture and religion. Christians invented the devil as a way to account for evil; the problem with this explanation is that God would also be responsible for the devil's existence.

Now culture serves as a tool to neutralize aggression. This is achieved by turning aggression back against the ego, and the instrument for this inversion is the superego. Freud writes:

Aggressiveness is introjected, internalized, it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from, that is, it is directed against his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of conscience, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization therefore obtains mastery over the individuals dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.

 

The garrison is the superego, the conquered city is the ego, and the attacking army is civilization insofar as it provokes the ego’s aggression through the demand for drive renunciation. Human nature itself is under attack because it is now seen as dangerous. The conflict that characterizes the human being is the clash between the pursuit of happiness and aggressiveness, and this creates a barely civilized, ferocious animal, endowed with reason. For Freud, civilization is a means of protection against the human being’s very own nature; and sometimes this mechanism can fail.

The existing social and political organizations are the products of a given society's efforts to domesticate this fundamental aggression, but sometimes the struggle is lost, and the resulting madness in the name of a state or an ideology can become unimaginable. Freud knows from his own experience what political repression and discrimination is, but he does not endorse Marxism or any other philosophies of liberation, although he strongly sympathizes with the critique of capitalism and of the poverty that results from it. Freud wants to explore the mechanism behind the superego as precisely as possible. For him, guilt has two sources: the fear of external authority and the fear in relation to one's own superego. The second source is crueler, because one cannot hide the intentions to do bad things from it. This impossibility heightens the fear in relation to the superego and produces the consciousness of being a sinner. Occasionally, such a person wishes to be punished as a way to discharge the feelings of guilt, even if no crime or violation of the law is committed. From the standpoint of the superego, no actual wrongdoing has to be committed in order to judge the subject as bad: the actual deed and the intention to commit it are not very different for an intra-psychic agency.   

External authority can be satisfied through an act of drive renunciation, but, since drive renunciation in most cases does not eliminate the wish, the superego will continue to cause a sense of guilt, which leads to the need for punishment. At this point, the direction of causation changes. Initially, the superego is conceived of as the continuation of external authority through an act of identification and internalization, and therefore it causes drive renunciation.  At some point, however, the process becomes inverted. The presence of the superego causes even more guilt, and this leads to drive renunciation beyond the originally necessary amount. The superego has now gained a certain independence and feeds itself on the inhibition that it effects in the operation of the drives. The reversal is best understood from an economical viewpoint: drive energy that is not released due to drive renunciation is taken over by the superego and turned against the ego. Freud explains this process in the following passage, which contains some remarkable statements.

By means of identification he takes the unattackable authority (of the father, JB) into himself. The authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child's ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the authority – the father – who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the real situation is reversed: 'If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.' The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external object. That is typical, too. But the essential difference is that the original severity of the super-ego does not – or does not so much – represent the severity which one has experienced from him (the father), or which one attributes to him; it represents rather one's own aggressiveness towards him. If this is correct, we may assert truly that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse, and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions of the same kind.

The identification with the external authority leads to a split within the subject. The ego itself remains identified with the real father, who appears now, after the creation of the superego, as degraded authority. The creation of the superego reverses the direction of the original aggression back against the subject. An external threat becomes internalized; this process enhances the subject's primary aggression and distorts the perception of the threat: What the subject experiences in relation to the external threat is not so much the real situation but the strength of its own aggression against it. Conscience arises thus from the suppression of an aggressive impulse and increases in strength with each successive repression.

[batteries not included]

The Look

[...] Sartre describes being alone in a park, at this time, all relations in the park (e.g. the bench is between two trees) are available, accessible and occurring -- for him. When another person arrives in the park, there is now a relation between that person and the bench, and this is not entirely available to him. The relation is presented as an object (e.g. man glances at watch), but is really not an object, it cannot be known. It flees from him. The other person is a "drainhole" in the world, they disintegrate the relations of which Sartre was earlier the absolute centre. This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that they confuse for a real person for a moment. While they are believing it is a person, their world is transformed, and everything exists as an object that partially escapes them. During this time the world comes on to you differently, and you can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now his world, a foreign world that no longer comes from you, but from him. The other person is a threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world ... Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control. When they realize it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center.

Man, Sartre is so full of nothing - I mean when you go to a park there is this tendency on your part to socialize with people, not consider them "drainholes" and the like!

[Teach Me Tiger]

Actually the state should pay for sexually active women to revert to virginity (or at least pay for an operation that will allow them to give the impression that they are virgins). France does, even though France is such a militantly secular nation that hijabs are banned in school, and even though the only women interested in "hymenoplasty," as the procedure is known, are Muslims for whose intended husbands their non-virginity will be a deal-breaker. Dr. Bernard Paniel is an obstetrician-gynecologist for France's public health system, and over many years has become the go-to guy for Muslim women who need to be "mended" before their wedding night, or face the wrath of their shamed, traditionally-minded grooms and the probable annulment of their marriage.  Dr. Paniel "mends" about 30 broken hymens a year with a simple procedure that can be performed with a local anesthetic. He considers himself the "oil in the machine" that allows tradition to carry on, and is teaching the procedure, which he learned as a visiting doctor in a Tunisian hospital in the 1960s, to his younger colleagues. Dr. Paniel doesn't issue "virginity certificates" as some of his colleagues do, but perhaps just as controversially -- and resulting in the same effect -- he does provide his patients with vials of blood to produce on their wedding night. It is an understatement to observe that such (in our culture) medieval-era proofs of virginity -- blood on the wedding night sheets displayed to witnesses -- is utterly outmoded, a relic of pre-enlightened times in Judaism and Christianity. But the continuing, and consequential fixation with virginity amongst observant Muslim men is a reality, and the practice of hymenoplasty has now become a legal and political hot chestnut in France.

For in April a court in the northern French city of Lille annulled a marriage between a convert to Islam and a French woman of North African provenance on the grounds that her husband had discovered on their wedding night that she was not a virgin. It is expected that the ruling will encourage Muslim men with retrograde views of women's obligations to believe the state supports their perspective. This will escalate demands for premarital virginity inspections, which in turn will up the demand for hymenoplasties. The verdict was only made public two weeks ago, and it is causing a ferment of denunciation. Last week 150 members of the European Parliament denounced the ruling as an act of "serious regression." Those who stand to lose the most from the ruling are modern Muslim women. The Muslim women's rights group "Ni putes ni Soumises" (neither prostitutes nor submissive) claim surgeons performing the intervention have overstepped their professional bounds. Illustrating this well-taken point, gynecologist Jacques Milliez, head of the ethics committee of the London-based International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, admits that he routinely issues certificates attesting to the "virginity" of his patients, and says many other colleagues do as well, whether the women are sexually active or not. Sihem Habchi, the group's president,  asks: "Does it really help? Doesn't it just bolster this tradition and this hypocrisy?" Dr. Milliez justifies his actions on the grounds that he is saving women from being ostracized by their communities. Nevertheless he is worried about the effects of the ruling and is organizing a "summit" around the procedure's ethics to be held in October.

Take it for what it's worth but I know a young woman who'd do it from behind so that she'd remain a virgin; she married her husband when she was 33.

[a g a p e]

Hierarchical, authoritarian institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, because growing up under their influence creates submissive/authoritarian personalities -- people who both "respect" authority (based on fear of punishment) and desire to exercise it themselves on subordinates. Individuals with such a character structure do not really want to dismantle hierarchies, because they are afraid of the responsibility entailed by genuine freedom. It seems "natural" and "right" to them that society's institutions, from the authoritarian factory to the patriarchal family, should be pyramidal, with an elite at the top giving orders while those below them merely obey. Thus we have the spectacle of so called "Libertarians" and "anarcho" capitalists bleating about "liberty" while at the same time advocating factory fascism and privatised states. In short, authoritarian civilisation reproduces itself with each generation because, through an intricate system of conditioning that permeates every aspect of society, it creates masses of people who support the status quo.

So basically the nuclear family, as the base unit of consensus society, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy has to be abolished? I've read some authors advocate the more primal and more radical model -- the band.

The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance -- and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open -- not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc.

In fact in our society many forces are working -- largely invisibly -- to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms -- and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band.

The very fluidity and temporality of networks created proves to be one of the fortes, instead of a downside, of the arrangement indeed.

Could you expand a bit?

[photogenic]

In Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the news of God's death in the mouth of a madman. People take no notice of him -- yet the image is striking: he carries a lantern in the morning, searching everywhere for God who cannot be found.

We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Realizing that no one believes him, the madman considers the bystanders: "I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still traveling; it has not yet reached the ears of men... This deed os still more distant from them than the most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves." Later that day, he visits the churches in the town and sings a requiem aeternam deo. "What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

The modern world has seemingly undertaken a serious experiment with regard to whether  or not a man can live without any god or religion. "God  is  dead," said Nietzsche. This was the destiny of modern European  civilization  because of science and technology. Rene Descartes is said  to be the founder of modern European philosophy. According to Hegel, Descartes is truly an originator of modern philosophy as long as modern philosophy claims "thought" as its principle.  After he doubted everything, Descartes reached a "thinking ego" whose existence cannot be doubted. This "thinking  ego," that is, reason or intellect, was the starting pointof his philosophy. It was not only the starting point of the Cartesian philosophy, but of the whole  modern philosophy or civilization, insofar as it demands the sundering of mind from nature and a subsequent mechanical conception of nature, and implicitly affirmed the need for, and right of, man to control this nature for his own purposes. Now this event in modern civilization is no longer confined to the European world. European civilization, particularly its science and technology, conquered the whole world by its rich productivity and powerful weapons. There is no country in the world which is not affected by Western science and technology. Thus the fate of the European civilization has become the fate of the whole world.
           
However, as Nietzsche saw,a formidable atheism is inherent in the early stage of modern civilization. "God is not simply dead, but we killed Him." God became useless to man when man developed a complete  trust  in his own reason and set about to exert an absolute  control over the material world at his own will. God is dead, and man and material nature took over the position of God. Dostoevsky, a prophet of historical destiny like Nietzsche, speaks through  the mouth of Ivan: "There is neither God nor immortality. As there is neither God, nor immortality,  man is allowed to do everything." He means that there is no morality without God. Karamazov asked his son Ivan: "Have we been deceived by priests for such a long time if there is neither  God nor immortality (as you say)?" Ivan answered, "There would not be our civilization if there were neither  God nor immortality." As Ivan says, all civilizations heretofore have been founded on religion. However, contrary  to Ivan's  words, a civilization  is now about to be formed  without God and immortality. It is time for us to ask with Dostoevsky: Can man secure his existence in a civilization without God? Will the day come when mankind must pay its debt for indulging in a fantasy? Or will the day of reckoning never come since that day would at once be the day of the total collapse of civilization?
           
Martin Heidegger is neither a proponent for returning to Christianity like Berdyaev or Dawson, nor an atheist like Marx or Sartre. God is dead, and a new god has not yet revealed himself. In order to receive a new god, Heidegger must first prepare a place for him. In order to prepare  the place we should find the place where the old god had revealed himself. The place where the old god had revealed himself is the place for the new god. In Heidegger's philosophy the key issue is whether or not he has discovered the place where the old god had revealed himself and whether or not he has prepared the place for the new god. Is it the case that the place for god argued for by Heidegger is not only appropriate for Christianity, but that it is also an appropriate place for the god in any other religion? Can the place for god thought by Heidegger can be a right place from the viewpoint of Buddhism? The central issue of Heidegger's  philosophy has always been "What  is  being?" "Being" had been regarded as self-evident in the European tradition of thought. But Heidegger throws doubt on "being" when thought of as self-evident. What is being? Being is not simply that which exists. A notebook exists here and a table exists there. But they are not being itself. The distinction between "being itself" and "beings" Heidegger calls the ontological difference.
         
Heidegger thinks that the meaning of "being itself" is to be disclosed through an actual being whose mode of existence is distinctly superior to all other modes of existence. What is this actual being? It is one whose mode of existence  is superior in the sense that it has awareness of its own existence. Heidegger thinks such actual being  is man (Dasein). Thus, Heidegger  claims that we must examine the meaning of Dasein, that is, human existence in order to reach being itself (Sein). What is the meaning of human existence? Heidegger seeks the meaning of Dasein  in terms of time. What he means by "time" is neither time  objectively conceived nor time subjectively perceived. According  to Heidegger, "time" means "finitude." "Finitude"  means "being unto death." This is to say, Dasein is temporal and man, being temporal, is finite, that is, a being unto death. His criticism of ontology since Plato is made from the standpoint  of conceiving human existence in terms of finitude, that is, death. In the  tradition of European ontology, being is sought after through  that which exists (das Seiende), but not through the existence of man (Dasein). Things which exist are projected in such a way that they are simply stared at (begafft) by man. When man becomes the subject who absentmindedly stares  at the world, things look as if they are simply existing before us. Heidegger calls such an existence Vorhandensein. Heidegger thinks that such a manner of conceiving things is due to the  ordinariness of Dasein. Man ordinarily forgets his death which is his essence and lives with this or that thing. Living in this manner, he conceives of being in terms of the function of things.

In contrast to this understanding of existence, Heidegger opens the way for a new understanding of being. It is a way of understanding which reaches being itself through Dasein as the finite   being, that is, the  being unto death. Heidegger in his "Being and Time" refers to this task of understanding as fundamental ontology. He tried to develop this fundamental ontology by adopting the methodology of Husserl's phenomenology, but he came to realize  that it is impossible  to develop his new way of understanding being within a phenomenology whose theme was the analysis of subject-consciousness. The  "turn"  or "reversal" in his thinking (Kehre) seems to begin from this realization.

[photogenic]

For the Oriental, natural death is ideal. Man is born from Nature and returns to Nature. Returning  home, returning to the  motherly earth is the ideal of the Orient. The form of death must be painless. 'Saakyamuni Buddha returns in peace into Nature after he has lived for 80 years. In the East the man whose death is not natural is not qualified to be a saint. In this regard the spiritual tradition  of the West differs from that of the East. Here a question  arises as to why a man who was murdered can be the most ideal man in the West. There arises yet another problem. What does the death  of Socrates or Jesus mean in the spiritual history of the  West? The death of Socrates  means neither the mere end of his life, nor a return to nothingness, in the Buddhist sense. Socrates, facing death, proved the immortality of the soul.  And he died  without  fear, as if he were  going  to another splendid world. The soul which cognizes the eternal is also eternal like the eternal Idea. If the soul is eternal, it does not fade away at death. Facing death Socrates imagines the realm of the spirit awaiting his soul.  Death here does not mean the returning to nothingness as in the case of Buddha. Death, for Socrates, is an assurance of eternal life for man.
           
In the case of Jesus Christ, his death also does not mean returning to nothingness. Jesus was the Son of God. As the Son of God, Jesus is essentially immortal. His Crucifixion was to atone for the sin of man. But he was resurrected from death and he will come again to bring the Kingdom of God. Such death cannot  mean what death truly means. His death is to mean the proof  for eternal life -- it is a much more decisive  proof  than Socrates' death. Through His death the atonement for man's sin as well as immortality of the soul are promised. Jesus is in eternal Heaven after the Resurrection. Through Him man may ascend to eternal Heaven. In other words, man is promised his eternal life as well as the coming of the new Kingdom of God. The death of Jesus promises much more than that of Socrates. If such is the case, we would  think  as follows: The  two deaths as the highlights of European tradition are not death as we understand it. They are seemingly  deaths, but they are in fact proofs for eternal life. Through those two deaths eternity is brought into the European world.       

[dearlove]

Great expose, photogenic, but what relation does it bear to Eastern thought? That's what what's at point here.

An unexamined belief in Western philosophy is that "things" change over a linear time sequence. Eastern writers have challenged this notion, saying that a belief in time as a past, a present, and a future is just another conceptual illusion which is a result of physical attachment, and instead propose an ever-present. Time is illusory, urging us to aim for the eternal now, beyond space and time. In Heidegger, as in Western tradition generally, man has to awaken to an authentic mode of historical existence, to an awareness and acceptance of his essential facticity and mortality. Man remains the mortal man of finitude. There is no complete surrender and merger, or even loss of self, in Heidegger's thinking. More specifically, there is Heidegger's discussion of temporality. Temporality is the foundational structure of Dasein's Being (i.e., of existentiality, facticity, and fallenness) and does not consist of the linear passing of discrete "now-points." The past, the present, and the future do not follow one another in sequence. Rather, they exist simultaneously in a dynamic process in which each gives rise to the other. Consider, for example how a patient in psychotherapy "lives" both his or her past and future in the present. Lastly, consider the Hindu belief that consciousness transcends the individual. Consciousness is generally believed to be a relatively private matter; that is, each one of us is "conscious," but each consciousness is unique to that person and is in no way shared by others. In Hindu thought, however, individualized ego consciousness is considered to be only a partial manifestation of a more global condition. The universe and all that comprises it is made up of consciousness, not a personal consciousness of, but pure consciousness.

At first glance, Heidegger's notion of consciousness appears to be very similar to the Eastern conceptualization. Dasein's consciousness (Being) does not rest simply within but reaches out beyond itself and toward the world and other beings. For Heidegger as a phenomenologist, however, consciousness is always a consciousness of something; that is, consciousness is intentional. It always has an object. Dasein, however, not only reaches out and transcends itself in this fashion, it is also conscious of Being, since it is Being that allows Dasein to exist, or to be as it is. Even though Heidegger seems to be constantly dwelling in the vicinity of the mystical and of self-transcendence, he does not speak explicitly of the mystical union as an experiential moment of eternity. Rather, for Heidegger, there is a mystical openness possible in authentic Dasein for the calling and depth of Being manifesting in things as an experience of meditative thinking, of reflective quietude, still ontologically conceived rather than exponentially and existentially described. Heidegger conceives of the task as one of bringing revealed Being into language, of saying the unsaid, of thinking the unthought, of bringing the event of Being into language. His own meditative thinking discourse is done in terms of
concrete universals, a marriage of poetic and philosophical diction.