GENIUS FORUMS

(In some freakish loop from hell, I am unable to register my logout. That'll teach me :) but logging out, I am . . .)

Pye wrote:Nick, with all due respect - and I mean that sincerely - where the fuck have you been through all of the women-are-this, women-are-that dialogues that take place here? Every one of them has been aimed at object-blame - or if you prefer - object denigration in order to address subject weakness. "Women are unconscious. Women have no hope of becoming enlightened. Women are flighty flibberty-gibbets. Women are not human-being. Women cannot think. Women cannot reason." etc. Each of these are explicit transferences of what most men become around them. The concern of enlightenment will never be anyone or anything but the self and its inward exploration. This outward denigratory focus is what children do when they want an excuse.

Alright, I have never heard anyone call women flighty flibberty-gibbets! haha... Seriously though, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I haven't witnessed anyone say that women are unconscious, but you must know by now that the basis of the Woman philosophy is not so much about women as it is about femininity. The only reason women and the feminine are juxtaposed is because women tend to embody the feminine much more than men do. When you have an empirical example that so clearly expresses the psychological dynamic going on within our self, namely the dynamic between male and female human beings; why wouldn't you use it to your advantage? I don't know why you see this as avoiding inward exploration when it's so obvious that understanding the masculine and the feminine is all about looking within our selves and understanding how these different aspects of the ego determine how we think and act.

Pye wrote:And for a philosophy that purports a toughness to ego, a tearing down of same, none of it is directed at that ego directly. Instead, object-denigration is the high house of comfort in which this masculinity is encouraged to reside. It's tantamount to saying other people are responsible for my problems of consciousness. In what universe of wisdom will that ever be right?

Attacking the feminine is attacking the ego. This is done so what is left of the ego is the masculine aspect, the aspect more suited for a life in pursuit of enlightenment. Of course one must eliminate all of the ego, both the feminine and the masculine, in order to attain enlightenment.

Pye wrote:No real exposition of Man as myth has ever taken place here. Here, the Woman-myth is the problem. Get rid of the Woman-myth and man will see himself clearly? My ass. Man simply has to begin seeing himself clearly. And as long as he coddles and nurtures his own mythic dimensions, he's doomed.

Do you think this perception is caused by a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the masculine is more conducive to wisdom than the feminine is? Because again, you must have heard many discussions about how the spiritual life is a life in which one uses the ego to eliminate itself, both the masculine and the feminine?

Pye wrote:The congratulations were for stating outright that women are not the problem: that your response-to and desire for them is. Here, in this: "you basically said that there is a denial of the fact that men become unconscious around women or "lose their sense of self" around them. I do not deny this." The only other person I have ever seen that from here is skipair. As I recall, he didn't "understand" this construct properly, either, according to many of you.

OK, but to look at this in another way, think of a person who has a problem with addiction to heroin but has no chance of getting over the addiction because people keep bringing the drug around him. Do you think society has good reason to be critical of the people who keep bringing the heroin around him?

If you think society would have good reason to be critical of those bringing drugs around the addict, wouldn't society, or just those of us here at GF who value consciousness, have good reason to be critical of women who, in the name of fashion and looking "cute", dress and act in a way that makes men who are already prone to bouts of unconsciousness, experience these bouts at a higher rate and prolong them?

I mean, why is being critical of women necessarily an avoidance of responsibility?

Ah, I was expecting you to swing your nuts my way, dejavu.

To answer your question about skirts, I don't care who wears them and how short they are, and if you understood what I wrote to pye, as well as the foreword in Quinn's book by Nietzsche, you would know they are completely in step with each other. To reiterate my point, I'm not advocating that anyone should blame anyone else for their shortcomings, and being critical of women, or anything else for that matter, shouldn't necessarily be viewed as such.

Preoccupation with the elimination of the ego, hmmm. I wouldn't say I'm preoccupied with that idea in particular, at least not as much as knowing and meditating on the truth.

Do you really think I haven't given any thought as to whether the ego can be eliminated or not? What's your definition of the ego anyways?

dejavu wrote:

An object is defined by the value of its self.

A nonsensical sentence. An objects value is defined by its valuer.

Like I said, "derived from instantiation of its parents". Any valuers are objects themselves in your sentence so a bit misleading.

There's nothing nonsensical about remarking that the object is nothing but itself, its appearance, its instantiation. What is superfluous is claiming they do not have inherent values. Duh! There's nothing inherent about its very existence, let alone its value! It was a "no brainer" and I pointed that out to her.

You seem to be five miles out on this whole thing. As is Pye who appears to have absorbed nothing at all, thereby almost single-handedly proving Quinn's thesis on how much is stacked against women. She appears to have constructed a totally separate narrative, a red herring, to deal with the topic, her absorbed and reworked topic now, instead what actually is being discussed. She's in her own little world of words turning circles, having left the actual discussion on this forum quite a while ago.

I should have mentioned that I was quoting Quinn to give the OP perspective on the quote he/she posted. Rather than give my opinion on the quote I simply provided a means to answering their question about Quinn's underlying meaning. I happened to be reading Woman at the time I came upon this thread. As such I haven't promoted Quinn's viewpoint.

My perspective at current is that the brain is highly malleable and adapts to social demands largely. The chances of someone really stepping outside of the system is rare. The chance is much higher in a statistical male upbringing. However, the dichotomy that does exist between men and women in cultures is not ex nihilo - for no reason. The underlying differences between men and women anatomically are exacerbated by cultural evolution. They become expressed, woman's innate tendencies are cultivated by society, as are man's. They are cultivated in such a way that is beneficial to the social organism, or so it would seem. This process over time presents a much stricter dichotomy than actually exists. All such dichotomous generalizations are fundamentally erroneous. There are plenty of in-betweens and outliers. But that is not to say that the two basic dimensions are not interacting to create a spectrum. There can be a prototypical Man and prototypical Woman which represent a spectrum of actual potential. This doesn't mean that anyone is actually the prototype of either man or woman. Most people would probably be slightly off or way off. Some people seemingly lie right in the middle of being a man or a woman. This applies to anatomy as well as psychology. The anatomical prototypical woman is not the same as the psychological prototypical woman. They are fundamentally different dimensions of the individual entity, although they invariably share a correlation.

So basically, I think there are real anatomical differences in the case of prototypical man and woman, but few people would ever match these prototypes exactly. The psychological prototypes are not just the anatomical prototypes but also the manner in which the culture has expressed the differences. The brain is plastic, so in theory a psychological woman could be made into a psychological man and vice versa -- even from one prototype to another but the chances of this occurring are extremely low. Statistically people will tend to gravitate towards the psychological prototypes of their anatomically prototypical condition. That is people identifying themselves as anatomical women will tend to gravitate toward the cultural prototype of woman as a result of the anatomical similarity and societal demands. On occasion however individuals of one apparent sex will model the opposite gender prototype. All of this is well known to biology, there are "men" who have XXY configuration (Klinefelter's syndrome), and other such configurations, dysfunctional SRY gene, etc...


I think we can say something about the prototypical Man and prototypical Woman. Quinn's WOMAN in Woman is a sort of prototypical woman that is common in some philosophical eras. Postmodernism really introduces the idea that men and women are equal and thats a fairly recent philosophical phenomena. For most of human history philosophers seem to debate in terms of prototypical WOMAN and MAN. The prototypes in this philosophical tradition obviously aren't based on a massive double-blind study carried out in the modern method of science, but they nevertheless prove useful even in modern times. You don't really need to understand biology to realize that nobody is exactly the same, that the prototype is just a prototype and not a description of every instance of a human. There could in fact be no perfect model of the spectrum of human psychology and anatomy, such a model if it were to exist would be an incalculable mathematical equation based on meiosis, but even this would not be able to account for environmental circumstances that could alter the otherwise probabilistic expression of all necessary genes to make the prototypical woman. Our equation would predict a woman and we'd end up with someone bordering between man and woman perhaps. There is just no perfect model and especially not one that is fruitful to work with and overly calculating when its not necessary. We can simply realize what the limitations of our simple models are and treat them as if they are simple models. I don't think Quinn does a bad job on this, but I don't think he writes books for everyone. Its easy to get upset reading Woman if you aren't thinking like Quinn. If you assume its just his ego coming out and he's really misogynistic you can get hung up on that assumption and completely miss what his message is.


Quinn also points out that without WOMAN society wouldn't have held to together. It is the same negative qualities which account for our survival as a society, otherwise we'd all be too masculine to maintain a society. Whether or not Quinn thinks maintaining a society is important or good is not something I can speculate on. To me a lot of things are love/hate or simply non-dichotomous. I struggled as a child in the 80s and as a teenager in the 90s to what I saw as a growing degradation of men. My own mother -- when my parents divorced -- spoke of men as assholes and idiots most of the time. I used to watch Married With Children in which the men are dumbest people on the show, but most of television was like this and still is. So, I know what its like to hear someone say something generalized about one's own gender, sadly my mother is actually right, men are mostly assholes and idiots. I won't go into detail about what an asshole or an idiot is in this colloquial usage. Well I've tried to make my point in as clear and non-offensive way possible and shed some light on the discussion.

dejavu wrote:"There's nothing inherent about its very existence" lol - Bullshit. While it is true (and by all means feel free to question the superfluity of such a truth) that nothing has inherent value, it is definitely not true that nothing has inherent existence. All existence is inherent, and by virtue of this, so too every individual, instantiated, self-defining, god-damned object.

Perhaps you differ on what inherent or intrinsic means in the context. Anyway, it was you who claimed that an objects value is always defined by its valuer. But you seem to be willing to let it keep some intrinsic value: its own existence, its own individuality, and yes those are values too, primary ones. First we acknowledge existence and individuality and from there flows further judgment and ranking depending on how this construct relates to other "valued" objects.

‘Seeming’? ‘Appearing to’? Where is the incisive tone? The penetrative glance? The clear and resounding assertion of any truth to these things? Where is your masculinity?!

Funny! But there's a simple reason why certain assertions are introduced differently than others. Part of masculinity is deliberation, one just doesn't blurt out rants without thought. For you masculinity is just the glance or rigid stance, at least according to your icon? The superficiality of this view would imply typical wink-wink femininity.

It is not, nor has it ever been, sensitivity to the criticism of women that underpins my rejection of this "philosophy," so we do not need patronizing understanding of what that must "feel" like for a woman to hear. I am as hard on all willful ignorance everywhere I go, and there are heaps of it aplenty within all-things human, male or female. It must comfort some to think this as "hurt-feelings" because it permits you to avoid the reasoning put forth here - the critique of the configuration itself - and the tower of work you [rhetorically] would still need to do once all-things-good=all-things-masculine is understood as the dangerously protective construct that it is. Such a construct not only fails to deliver you, it forcefully embeds you in the 'sordid fetish' you seek to transcend. Whether you water it down even further to mean masculine or feminine tendencies, you are still in the congratulatory skin of conceptual madness, hence what you assume to be the remedy is actually the poison.

That men, the masculine, however you like it, represent the principle of reasoning, clarity, etc. for you does nothing to assure that this reasoning is of soundness and light. The world has fallen asleep into many many of the dreams of reason since the age of Socrates; it has lived and died by them without coming any closer to the truth. Manichaeism is another of those conceptual sicknesses that has plagued both human thinking and concrete world affairs, and perhaps it comes from reasoner-man's entirely unimaginative condition of seeing himself in competition with all else for anything he hopes to gain. The other must be vanquished - be it his sex competition, his food competition, or the offspring that do not belong to him, the beliefs he does not hold, or the human other that walks just like him but surely must be from the planet of hell. Here is his bright reasoning, embedded deeply in his animal mind, and drawn, always, not along the truth contained in the dual-nature of consciousness, but in the dream-sickness that one must somehow come out on top of it all. Further this dream-sickness denies his body and anything that reminds him of body, for animal is surely what we are not. That animal of us, too, must be vanquished, he thinks. And he thinks this solely because he thinks. And because he thinks, he forgets.

Without the manichaeistic comfort taken, everything else looks to this line of thinking like a fall-back into darkness, the feminine darkness, the lack of individuation which terrifies poor thinking man. What he has done is fallen forward into the longest centuries of his dreams-of-reason, with what I imagine to be many more centuries of it to come. Man thinks he can see the world clearly because he reasons. He has not passed fully through his age of waking-dreams yet, from an organ still ungrown and still unsound. Apparently he will have to make the whole loop in order to "become what he is."

if woman had no soul...it would be because she sold it to the devil
to find a man to love her.

Little did she know sex & love mean the same to man.
A woman values love .
A man values sex.

No sex...no value woman.

A man that degrades womankind is mentally ill.
A woman that degrades mankind is mentally ill.

There are many mentally ill men & women .

I'm not quite sure what some of you are advocating here. ?

While I agree that excessive emotionalism(feminine*) and an overinflated ego(masculine*)are detrimental to the the process of enlightment, and both can lead to delusion, I don't see the elimination of the ego and emotions as compatible with the enlightenment, quite the opposite. I believe that a healthy ego/healthy emotion are essential to the process of attaining wisdom.

*edit: to add fem/masc conceptually, not specific to literal gender

Diebert: You seem to be five miles out on this whole thing. As is Pye who appears to have absorbed nothing at all . . . She appears to have constructed a totally separate narrative, a red herring, to deal with the topic, her absorbed and reworked topic now, instead what actually is being discussed. She's in her own little world of words turning circles, having left the actual discussion on this forum quite a while ago.

Diebert, why do you insist I remain confined to the whole house when the foundations are already rotten?

A Manchaeistic [mis]interpretation of the wisdom of the Tao?
A repetitive violation of A=A (consciousness = masculinity)(Woman=women)?
An ego-less being as goal?
The bad faith of object denigration?
The misunderstanding of emotion as emotionalism
The sexualization of philosophy?
etc.

It appears to be you who cannot see himself outside of it – stuck in someone else’s “own little world” making circles for them.

Finally, this:

Diebert: You seem to be five miles out on this whole thing. As is Pye who appears to have absorbed nothing at all, thereby almost single-handedly proving Quinn's thesis on how much is stacked against women.

Honestly, Diebert – and let me put this into language you understand – this is the lowest, most womanly moment I’ve ever seen you have on this forum.

dejavu wrote:No, not intrinsic value, only intrinsic existence. Existence itself as value would imply its dependency upon a valuer.

Value is not the same as worth. At least it's not how I used it, very deliberately so and I hoped it would be clear from the context. A value, the value, is nothing but the content of a variable. Or in case of an object it's the collection of references we give it, starting with the first one: a self.

The process of evaluation in a context creates all kinds of hierarchies, orders, systems of knowledge and so on. Worth is coming into play only then.

Pye is right, you are a spin doctor!

Spin doctors are the power behind the power, in the center of the web. Not to catch bugs as much but to enable for example a Prime Minister to be elected over someone else! So I kinda like the label. But I take it to mean you have difficulty following the twists and traps I put in ordinary worn out language. My bad :-)

Carmel wrote: While I agree that excessive emotionalism(feminine*) and an overinflated ego(masculine*)are detrimental

Not everyone would agree with this distinction. Emotionalism and overinflated or extended ego are too much intertwined to split them as masculine vs feminine. It would be closer to the Genius discourse to put emotionalism against purpose, rationality or a single-minded persistence. This type of masculinity might build up an ego but just as easily can curtail or even destroy it, depending on how someone defines ego. The inflation always is an emotional thing, an attachment, that blocks the rational self-critical processes that would bring it all down to earth again.

Pye wrote: That men, the masculine, however you like it, represent the principle of reasoning, clarity, etc. for you does nothing to assure that this reasoning is of soundness and light. .... Man thinks he can see the world clearly because he reasons. He has not passed fully through his age of waking-dreams yet, from an organ still ungrown and still unsound. Apparently he will have to make the whole loop in order to "become what he is."

The only way to way to be sure reasoning is of "soundness and light" is through further reasoning. However, it becomes clear rather quickly, even to a beginning thinker, that he can never be certain of the products of his reasoning, his conclusions or if the world has now become more clear.

No matter to which size his "organ" would grow, everything will still become what it is. Only absolute and eternal truths can be concluded and all the other observations will always be contextual, fallible but it's not a reason to withdraw in silence. It's like that Zen stick that hits you thirty times whatever context is delivered.

Pye wrote: Finally, this:

Diebert: You seem to be five miles out on this whole thing. As is Pye who appears to have absorbed nothing at all, thereby almost single-handedly proving Quinn's thesis on how much is stacked against women.

Honestly, Diebert – and let me put this into language you understand – this is the lowest, most womanly moment I’ve ever seen you have on this forum.

Well, you've to admit, it was put in a language that you clearly understood and likewise responded. But there's also truth here: it's hard for me to recognize your recaps the last few months as representing anything written here. And I'm able to digest near anything, a wider appetite you'd not easily meet, so I'm inclined to go with my experience in explaining the situation: you have done that utmost womanly thing: to point beyond yourself, surrounding, embellishing your thoughts with too many alien, mysterious, unfinished, unborn possibilities. It's you who are the child of this age, really, the age of dreams, the planet of otherworldly hell called "heaven-around-a-corner".

dejavu wrote:Oh, I see. It must be me. You must then please help me to understand how your little ‘corrupt society/ scantily clad harlot’ analogy is in step with the passage by Nietzsche. I really must know.

Re-examine the context of it in relation to the rest of my post and my hope is that you can figure it out on your own. You did read the last sentence right?

pye,

Take away the feminine and no longer does man seek to overcome by connecting through emotion and feeling, but being masculine, he still needs to overcome. How does he do it? What is the means by which he must now overcome in order to become? Philosophy! He rips the world apart! Every last shred until all that is left is truth, then he is at peace.

Mountains are mountains, mountains are not mountains, but wait, mountains are mountains.

dejavu wrote:You mean this? "I mean, why is being critical of women necessarily an avoidance of responsibility?"

Yes.

dejavu wrote:Sorry Nick, still can't. You'll have to spell it out for me. Your hoping just isn't working.

The foreword in Quinn's book is simply saying that one needs to perfect their self if they don't want to be corrupted by women, but it is still very critical of women, especially in this statement here which implies that women are unconscious and not capable of forming for their self an identity without men doing it for them:

The sage shook his head and smiled. "It is men," said he, "that corrupt women; and all the failings of women should be atoned and improved in men. For it is man who creates for himself the image of woman, and woman forms herself according to this image."

When I stated the fact that women, being what they are, can cause men to behave unconsciously, I was simply making an observation that can not be denied. So being critical of women in this regard is in no way meant to avoid man's responsibility to remain conscious at all times regardless of whether women are around them or not. More importantly though, criticizing women is a great way to get men to question their beliefs about women.

Is this really that difficult to understand?

dejavu wrote:How adorable! At peace with the truth! As if.

You find no peace in truth? I'm sorry to hear that.

dejavu wrote:What of the will to power?

That's what I was just talking about! Pay attention boy.

dejavu wrote:No, we're not talking about finding peace in the truth, but being at peace with it Nick.

We who? I'm speaking for myself. Who are you speaking for?

dejavu wrote:Stop pulling a Diebert.Your words suggest a final state, an attainment, where in actuality there is only ever the will to more.

Not in the sense I'm talking about. There is no such thing as becoming doubly enlightened, you either are or not.

Pye wrote:The congratulations were for stating outright that women are not the problem: that your response-to and desire for them is. Here, in this: "you basically said that there is a denial of the fact that men become unconscious around women or "lose their sense of self" around them. I do not deny this." The only other person I have ever seen that from here is skipair. As I recall, he didn't "understand" this construct properly, either, according to many of you.

My current perspective with women is that they are fun and entertaining. I go to them like I go to the computer, a video game, youtube, or a novel. I'm feeling very few negative emotions about the whole thing. I don't think I become unconscious around women any more than with those other activities. I'm certainly not having any earth-shattering insights, but I think I've clarified all the fundamentals anyway.

My perspective is now essentially the same as when I first came on this forum, which btw has been a pleasure to read recently. The difference now is that I've been through the GF crucible, and that was the whole point. A high school English teach who was a big intellectual inspiration to me said once: "The flimsiest of faiths are the ones unquestioned."

I don't think any heterosexual man can honestly say he is not sexually attracted to women. He may or may not decide to act on that. But what he most certainly can and should do is recognize the socially conditioned propaganda-perspective for what it is. Boolsheet. :) Rockin on GF.

Carmel:
While I agree that excessive emotionalism(feminine*) and an overinflated ego(masculine*)are detrimental

Diebert:
Not everyone would agree with this distinction.

Carmel:
Yes, I am aware of this. I tend to think of the ego as primarily "masculine" due to its quality of firmness. --Sometimes I use the terms yang(firm) and yin(yielding) so as to keep the gender discussion separate or bypass it completely.

Diebert:
Emotionalism and overinflated or extended ego are too much intertwined to split them as masculine vs feminine. It would be closer to the Genius discourse to put emotionalism against purpose, rationality or a single-minded persistence.

Carmel:
Well stated. I prefer this distinction to that of "masculine/feminine" as it more to the point. Whether emotionlism and rationalism are masc or fem is not relevant, at least, not to me personally, some may see it differently.

Diebert:
This type of masculinity might build up an ego but just as easily can curtail or even destroy it, depending on how someone defines ego.

Carmel:
"depending on how someone defines ego"?
I don't quite follow this. What definition of ego is required to "curtail" or "destroy" it.

Diebert:
The inflation always is an emotional thing, an attachment, that blocks the rational self-critical processes that would bring it all down to earth again.

Carmel:
I agree.

Nick:
When I stated the fact that women, being what they are, can cause men to behave unconsciously, I was simply making an observation that can not be denied.

Carmel:
A woman can't "cause" you to behave unconsciously, especially if you are fully conscious. The only influence she has over you is that which you give her.

Carmel,

Most men are largely unconscious, and become even more unconscious when they find themselves in the presence of women. This isn't about blaming women, but you are so wrong when you say that women don't cause men to behave a certain way. Again this is not excuse for men, it's just a matter of fact. It's all too obvious to me. Maybe it's harder for you to recognize it because you are a woman, so naturally you wouldn't be able to see how they behave when they aren't around women.

Ideally, children would get a private education in a single sexed school. Boys would turn out so much better without girls around, and vice versa, especially during junior high, and high school. Actually, studies are showing primary and elementary are just as important as opportunities to create a curriculum tailored to appeal to the unique minds of each gender. Boys and girls not only learn differently, but they behave differently in each others presence, I say it's for the worst when they're together, for the better when they are apart.

Are you serious with this dumb shit? I don't directly respond to people's questions or assertions unless they make at least a little bit of sense. Try again.

Carmel: A woman can't "cause" you to behave unconsciously, especially if you are fully conscious. The only influence she has over you is that which you give her.

Nick: This isn't about blaming women, but you are so wrong when you say that women don't cause men to behave a certain way.

Carmel is right on top of Nick's bad faith. If you, Nick, were to come to understand this - become conscious of it - you would be able to tear down the very thing you feel 'manipulated' by. Instead, bad faith causes one to cling to the very bars of their self-created prison.