The shadow adds “depth to a person’s character and makes their Mind more intricate. That darkness is like a constraint or deduction for an equation that would otherwise have functioned in a perfect, ideal environment.
Note: I credit the rapport and insubstantial bonds to a Facebook friend. The other ideas are mostly my own.
But then Truth isn’t really objective and separate, it only exists and becomes Real from the person’s subjective point of view, hence why morality is different depending on different people, why there are people for and against wars, why people get passionate about Politics etc.
For Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
Mike Leary, a Quora user, states that:
“The tormentor becomes the tormented.
People become what they love and hate, because their mind focuses on it.
The hall of mirrors folding in on itself. Madness”
(http://www.quora.com/What-did-Nietzsche-mean-when-he-said-if-you-stare-into-the-abyss-the-abyss-stares-back-at-you)
So you can see here that something that wasn’t necessarily a Truth (almost like a lie) is like a person not being object X because this person hates object X, actually becomes the object of their hatred because their mind focused on it e.g. a vigilante decides to take revenge on someone who wronged him but by doing so, he might become almost similar to that person who wronged him or worse. Recalling a past event with some of the Truth almost becomes a Lie because it no longer corresponds accurately to the Truth, the fact of the matter.
Compulsive liars who lie frequently, like Politicians, have gotten into the habit of lying that they can no longer distinguish Truth from Lie. So the Lie becomes a Truth in this case.
Pursuing the Path to Knowledge and Truth is like walking on a steep, rugged, stony, slippery and lonesome precipice. The higher you try to ascend, the more effort and exertion is required to maintain a semblance of the intended direction and destination you first set to achieving once you started at the foot of the precipice. This effort and exertion draws heavily on your physical and mental reserves.
Each trudge, pace, stride is a step closer to the summit and you will see along the way many who have fallen by the wayside, their fragile, flagging Will ebbed and shattered, their vision clouded, they are despondent and exhausted.Many will call to you to join and sit beside them like sirens to hapless sailors, their limited understanding being that by sitting still and watching the world go around them, they will achieve instant satisfaction but they don’t sit still at all and are slipping slowly and surely back to where they started at the foot of the precipice.
Moving past and ignoring such drifters, the higher you climb towards the summit, the more the world around you changes and shifts, what you thought and saw at the foot of the Path isn’t the mode of thinking and perception at the top. As what Robert Greene has said ages past, everything you knew and held dear is put in perspective in relation to the summit, like separate,disparate pieces coming together in an all encompassing puzzle, a deeper and fundamental understanding is gained like the warm feeling of sunlight on a cold, dull day.
When you imagine how the animal/plant cell is held together by intermolecular forces and how it is formed from elementary particles like Quarks, then you will see the value of learning Physics and it will motivate you.
Quarks form protons and neutrons. Neutrons and protons form nucleuses. Leptons are electrons. They combine to form atoms. Atoms make cells and other biological structure.
Atoms, compounds and molecules all interact with each other in the body or outside the body.
Atoms, compounds and molecules all interact with each other in the body or outside the body. 2 “up” Quarks and 1 “down” quark make a proton. 1 “up” quark and 2 “down” quarks make a neutron.
Alpha, beta particles and gamma rays released from an unstable nucleus interact with the human body or the atomic structure of a material. When I see the beautifully geometrical and coloured shapes of the alpha helix DNA, I think of mathematics, angles and Art. When a musician plays an instrument, they are manipulating sound waves and how they pass through a medium such as air particles such as the frequency, pitch etc. In effect, the musician is transferring energy.
It’s all interlinked.
Infinity is Paradox and Paradox is Infinity. Yes, zero divided x times proves that statement. Fascinating.
If I split “Nothing” into x times, then it wouldn’t be nothing but something, they would be parts of “Nothing” but “Nothing” can’t have any parts as it is nothing. So, paradox.
It’s interesting that you are an example of living History with your surname, a bunch of symbols. Those sequence of symbols belonged to your ancestors and their ancestors before them, changing in appearance or completely along the way, through the passage of time.
It’s all Information transmission. Your DNA from your ancestors are like 0 and 1 digits on a computer screen that has copied and changed over time with each great grand parent and grand parent you had. The surname you have was known in an entirely different form but has over the years undergone many variations and changes because the passing of the name to the next generation was due to the environment/ culture at the time.
The conquering of countries by the Greeks, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, British etc is all really process of passing information i.e. the death of one culture (which is a collection of ideas/ data) to be replaced or amalgamated by the occupier’s culture (another set of ideas/ data), all on top of the dead bodies of those who fought to keep their culture/ country from being invaded by empowering their leader, who represented those ideas, should they have won. Then those dead bodies decompose and the information they carry (DNA, bones) are stored in the Earth or taken up by bacteria and other decomposers.
History is the study of data/ idea transmission with significant Human variance.
I’m coming from a Science perspective, not the typical Historian’s view.
I wanted to simplify it like how Physicists simplify all the seemingly different Phenomena into one big Theory Of Everything.
I thought of this many years ago when I started taking my Philosophy classes in the first few months. Truth is like the whole, orange, spherical Sun and opinions are only shades/ particular viewpoints of that Sun, not really false, not really true. They say the Truth can set you free as when you stare into the Sun, you see its scale and magnificence in relation to us and everything we think and do. But for others persuaded to gaze temporarily into that celestial ball, it can burn and blind them forever, shattering their preconceptions irreversibly so much so that they prefer to live in their own shades and shadows, blinded by their own biases and denial.
Or perhaps those who gaze too deeply and pursue the Sun to the point where they are too close to it fall like Icarus, the Truth bringing about their own downfall; that is the strangeness of Truth.
Like a double-edged sword, Truth has no master, it can cause just as much harm to the wielder as to the receiver..
Use of the zombie in horror films symbolises what George A. Romero put forward as tool to criticise Society’s attitudes of general apathy to Politics, War, Education, the Environment in favour of practicing Consumerism, worship celebrities etc. Zombies could also represent Mankind’s fear of Death and one of the ways to express denial of our mortality – the continual torture of something having to be forced to continue its existence past it’s own death, to resist death from wounds that would normally kill a living person, to be killed off/ feared/ hated by the living, to act as a form of ridicule through its crude imitation of life etc.
There’s always sides, clashing of Egos, who is right/ wrong, superior/ inferior, all the way throughout time.
The differences because we live in a world of duality, disparity, inequality as what Lao-Tze pondered about a considerable time ago. Both sides try to annihilate each other, feeding the fire of this vicious cycle of hate like love.
Hannibal Lecter wanted to destroy his enemies by eating their flesh but in a way he became his opposition by absorbing their flesh, transforming their essence into his. To defeat your enemy whether in War, your workplace, family etc, you must think and understand like them, in a way you symbolically absorb their thought processes and Mind and this is shown all too well in history, especially ancient Roman history. When the ancient Roman empire fought a bitter long war with its rival, Carthage and eventually won through treachery, great bloodshed etc., Rome decided to wipe out the ancient city of Carthage from the face of the planet by destroying every building, every weed, every item that belonged to Carthage and enslaving its people. Rome thought it destroyed its enemy completely but no, the very memory of Carthage is etched in her conscious mind, embedded there like a poison. Rome may have destroyed the physical aspect of the enemy but not its Idea as today we remember Carthage. Rome destroyed herself in the process because she was forced to adapt to defeat Hannibal Barca’s mind and armies who represented Carthage so she became one with the enemy.
It’s the same with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where the feud between Protestants and Catholics escalated to the point where Britain was involved and more bloodshed and atrocities occurred. The late Protestant religious leader, Ian Paisley had made it his lifelong mission not to compromise with the Catholics over who should control Northern Ireland but eventually he gave in and cooperated with them in his later years prior to his death.
Hegelian dialectic, a system of thinking named after its creator who was a German Philosopher, organised a method of argument to resolve disagreements between one side, called the thesis and the opposition, called the anti-thesis. How these two positions are resolved is by combining the sides of Truth that they offer and bringing forth a new thesis called the Synthesis. It’s this same process that has happened in Northern Ireland and ancient Rome. The case with Hannibal Lecter is arguably true because what became of his enemies’ bodily matter was incorporated into his own protein structure, their presence having caused him to change no matter how small a change it was whether emotionally/ cognitively etc.
Enemies will change us (whether a person, thing, environment, at work etc) but for better or worse, that is where we have control. There is also the question of who becomes the dominant one after the process of assimilation/ Synthesis (like the North Americans of European descent) and the one who becomes a footnote, only to be a vague reminder of the events leading to Synthesis/ assimilation (like the Native Americans who are remembered for being the original Americans who had their lands taken away from them).
I like to do away with vague metaphysical terms like “intrinsic”, especially with the question of if morality is intrinsic. It’s not precise enough.
For people who kill like ISIS and for people like us who feel disgust, it seems to be how our brains and the environment we live in deciding the morality of things.
I haven’t read Friedrich Nietzsche work featuring the “Will to Power” concept yet but he mentioned another concept the “Master – Slave morality” and this is where I see how his idea is true. Perhaps there is no morality, only Power that comes in the form of survival of the fittest for individuals, working together for groups that are weak individually and the Justice system to keep the individuals and slaves in balance. If there is no Justice system in place, then there will be anarchy and the ruling Elites would lose profit/ control. The Masters in the modern context are the company CEOs, Politicians, Aristocrats etc while the Slaves are the working class, the poor, you and me, the soldier sent into the front lines to die for the sake of occupying foreign land for oil/ diamonds/ gold/ land etc.
Monkeys show similar behaviour to us because an experiment was conducted in which two capuchin monkeys were given a type of food; one monkey received a grape every time it cooperated with the Scientist whereas the other monkey only received cucumbers whenever it cooperated. After this experiment was conducted many times, the monkey that only received a cucumber began to realise he/ she was being treated unfairly because he/ she was aware that the other monkey kept receiving the grapes so he/ she responded by throwing the cucumber back at the Scientists. This explains why there are groups like Occupy Wall Street and other groups that are Left wing/ Socialists.
Of course, some philosophers say that morality is an emotional reaction, though I can’t remember the philosopher who said this, which is true because upon reading the first few pages of a book called “Confessions of a sociopath” by M. E. Thomas, she stated that when she found a baby Opossum struggling to swim to safety in the pool, she decided to kill it by submerging it with a net but gave up, letting it die a slow death. She didn’t feel any guilt, no remorse, no empathy for the animal, only that it was an inconvenience and needed to be gotten rid of so that her pool could be disinfected and used for a swimming lesson. She saw no benefit in keeping it alive. The same goes for serial killers like ISIS/ IS, the criminals in the big city etc.
There is also the cultural and environmental element involved as well; some cultures regard certain practices as acceptable while others don’t like Honour killings, marrying cousins etc while children or adult born or conditioned in an environment that is violent are likely to be violent.
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