http://www.quora.com/What-is-Achilless-greatest-accomplishment

Achilles’ greatest accomplishment was to realize the nihilism of his situation within the Western worldview and to embody that nihilism so we can understand our situation within the same worldview. What is key is that the Western worldview has not changed its structure in all this time so the situation that Achilles finds himself in is analogous to the situation we are all in within this strange, unique and onefold worldview.

The Iliad starts and focuses in on a conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon over Bresius a female slave who was considered a war prize. When Agamemnon had to give up his war prize female slave he took the one given to Achilles to make restitution. At this point Achilles realizes something fundamental, that there was no difference that made a difference between the Acheaens and the Trojans. Both of them stole women and besmirched the honor of Greek men by that means. At the point of that realization Achilles withdrew from the Battle. The Acheaens began to lose without him. Then Patroclus had the idea of appearing in the armor of Achilles to rally the troops. But he was cut down when he did that, and it sent Achilles into a berzerker rage, which only ended when the father of Hector came to get his body from Achilles. This scene of too much passivity followed by too much activity was a nihilistic response to a nihilistic situation. Nihilism as Stanley Rosen tells us is when there are two extreme artificial opposites in conflict which eventually are seen as the same, and when they are seen as the same then we lose meaning in our worldview because we no longer believe in the cause to which we were dedicated when we participated in the illusory conflict. A perfect example of this is the Democrats and Republicans who seem to be in conflict, even more these days. But it is really incumbents from either party who rule because they can pass laws that do not apply to themselves. Any two parties to a conflict become more and more like each other as they carry on the conflict in order to be able to succeed against the other. So it is only natural that in an anagogic swerve it is possible to change points of view and see that they are actually essentially the same despite superficial differences. Achilles realized that the whole war which was in the nineteenth year was really for naught because Agamemnon acted just like their enemy in this way what was analogous to the reason that they were fighting the war, which was to return the honor to Menelaus who lost his wife to Paris.

Once we realize that the whole of the focus of the Iliad is on this personal conflict and Achilles response to the action of Agamemnon because it involves a realization of the baselessness of the conflict on the part of Achilles. Why is it Achilles that realizes this, who has a bit of self-consciousness about the interminable war. It is because Achilles is already caught in the net of Nihilism. He was given the choice between living long without glory, or having a short glorious life. So already his life was fated to be caught in the web of nihilistic opposites, which can also be seen in his two responses which was withdraw and passivity in the midst of conflict, and then bezerker rage when his male lover was killed, i.e. being over active within the conflict, becoming like a natural force rather than being a human. Every thing about the myth indicates that Achilles life was one of entrapment by nihilism, up to including the fact that he was invulnerable everywhere on his body but on his heel where he was vulnerable.

It is important to remember that his mother was Thetis who was married to Peleus, in one of the few marriages that all the Gods attended. But it was at this marriage that Eris (strive) was not invited to that, she made appear the golden Apple, and it was Paris who was asked to choose which was the most beautiful of the Goddesses who should get the Apple. Paris chose Aphrodite, and for that she rewarded him with the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen who was already married to Menelaus. So strife entered into the Marriage of Thetis the nymph who was forced to marry a human because it was said that her son would be greater than his father, so Poseidon, Hades and Zeus decided that she should marry a human against her will so that the realms of the Gods and their balance of power should not be disturbed. Achilles was taught be Charon the Centaur like his father. And Achilles grew up to be a very great Hero, due to the oracle about him being greater than his father, who was great enough to wrestle a goddess into submission through her transformations. There are two parallels in myth that we have to be aware of. First of all only Thetis and Demeter wore the black cloaks of Grief, one for a son and the other for a daughter, and so the stories of Achilles and Persephone are in some way parallel. And also Menelaus wrestled with the Old Man in the sea to get word of Agamemnon who he had to hold on to as the old man transformed though various emanations before he was subdued and was forced to give his news to Menelaus. Both of these parallels are important. Achilles is fated to die like his father rather than becoming an immortal. The grief of Thetis has to do with the fact that her son is not immortal as she is and though him she tastes something of the devastation of time which takes all the humans to the grave eventually. Menelaus on the other hand becomes an immortal with his unfaithful wife Helen, but at least he was not killed on his homecoming as Agamemnon was by his unfaithful wife. Demeter also feels grief because her daughter is kidnapped by Hades and although she is immortal she must live in the underworld half the year, i.e. during the winter. Kore the innocent daughter becomes Persephone the terrible goddess married to Hades. Because the door to the underworld was seen as the hearth within the home there was a since in which all Greek women were married to Hades. But the secret of the mysteries appears to be that Persephone had an affair with Dionysus who was the only God to experience Death, and they had a child who was Pluto, the golden child. A child which like Gold could not tarnish, i.e. could not be effected by Death. In some sense this child is parallel to the Son of Achilles who comes to replace Achilles after the father is slain. Although the father dies the son carries on, and this is the only taste of immortality that humans have other than their names living on because of their acts of glory. So in a sense Achilles represents the fate of humans to only have access to immortality either through their names being preserved by the poems of poets that tell of their glorious deeds, or by passing on those names to sons who live up to their fathers names as Achilles son did. So Achilles represents the highest reward of humans by the Gods who confer on them glory in their offspring or in their deeds and the preservation of their names in poetry and in genealogy.

The mystery of Eleusis was the best kept secret of the ancient world. We really do not know what the vision was that was shown to the initiates. But it was rumored to be of a golden child, i.e. of Pluto, i.e. the child who was glorious and whose glory never faded because he was born in the underworld, perhaps with the Dionysus rather than Hades as his father. All we have are hints so this is a speculation. But if we compare the golden child born in Hades to Achilles son then we see that there is a parallel, in as much that the son of Achilles, lives up to his fathers name, bears his name, and both father and son do deeds of heroism to be remembered by the poets in the epics. This son of Achilles is above the earth, but there is a counterpart below the earth, which is born of Persephone and Dionysus, the only gods to taste Hades as Humans do. Persephone does not die but she enters and leaves the underworld. Dionysus was dismembered by the Titans and had to be reconstituted. Dionysus is the dual of Athena. Athena is born out of the Head of Zeus and Dionysus is born out of this thigh. These are nihilistic opposites, which is apropos because Zeus is the God who is a Storm God, like Baal of Ugritic myth, who has a dark and light face, i.e. the too much darkness of the thundercloud and the too bright of the lightening. So Zeus embodies nihilism, and the offspring that come from him directly are Athena and Dionysus each of whom play a role in the Odyssey. Athena is a key figure in the Odyssey, as Aphrodite is a key figure in the Iliad. Athena and Hera the losers in the beauty contest, are on the side of the Acheaens while Aphrodite is on the side of the Trojans because Paris picked her over the other Goddesses.

Who will taste death and slavery in Troy, Hector and his Wife, but also their young son who will not live on to carry the name of his Father, nor do glorious deeds. This son who is the son of the good wife, and the glorious hero against insurmountable odds trying to protect his family and city and especially his son, is the opposite of the golden child from the underworld. Both are fated to be only children.

But why would this untarnishable child be such a great consolation to the Greeks within the mysteries. Plato almost gives the secret away when he talks of the men of earth who only know what they can hold in their hands, and those initiated into the lesser mysteries like Heraclitus who think the invisible realm is flux (Dynamic Becoming, or Process Being), and those initiated into the greater mysteries like Parmenides who think that the invisible realm is stasis (Frozen Pure Being). But then Plato has the sophist go on and say that what we really want is Change and Changelessness at the same time. Plato calls this in the Timaeus the WorldSoul, i.e. a moving image of Eternity in time. The golden child is the one who will be ever young, and who will not taste the ravages of time, but is fated to remain like hidden gold under the earth. This is very much like a comment I made in another answer where I talked about how entropy only effects complex things beyond the atoms, because the atoms, are eternal. And thus as we look around at things, we can see them as eternal, even ourselves even though we are perishable at the macroscale, at the atomic scale everything we are made of does not experience entropy and only can be destroyed or transmuted by falling into a star or a black hole. Thus in our life and death we are all golden in some sense, because at the atomic level we cannot be tarnished by entropy. Thus there are really two forms of Glory, one is that which comes from the eternality of our substance, and the other comes from deeds and our names being passed down through time after we are gone. It is rumored that this golden child is not related to Hades but to Dionysus, who is the god of perpetual new emergent beginnings and he gives rise to Pluto through the one Goddess who is constantly cycling between the realm of Hades and the world of light above. So it is the god and goddess that taste death who can give rise to deathlessness of the Golden child, and in a sense we are all that Golden child despite the fact that we will die, and the child of Hector and his wife who are fated to lose their child, is also golden in this sense, because he has lived, in some sense at the most basic level he cannot be tarnished by entropy despite the fact that he will be killed. So in the glimpse we are given of the child of Hector and his wife before the battle in which Hector is killed that child lives on because of that mention by the poet, as does the deeds of his father even though ultimately the father was killed and the Trojans lost the war though their own gullibility.

Hector in some ways gave his life for naught. But in the scene we see when Hector is with his family there is deep meaning, because it refers to the normality of life, more than anything else in the rest of the epic. It is really the only family scene. But the lives of families together are dependent on the defense of cities, and the cooperation of those who live within the cities and take on their defense.

I hope you are getting a sense of the depth of this story that we can see through the mythic interconnections we can find. Achilles makes a choice to have a short life but to die in glory. This shows us that glory is the most significant thing to the Greeks. And even the losers if they fight valiantly receive their share of glory and honor as Hector did when Achilles gave Hector’s father the body of Hector. This exchange made Achilles human again because it reminded him that he would never see his father again, unlike Odysseus who would see his own father again after many trails when he returned home. The father is the source of honor when he buries his son and and the source of humanity when the son realizes that his own relation with his father will ultimately be like that of Hector. Both will die as heros outlived by their fathers, and thus they won’t be carrying on the names of their fathers, even though they did deeds of Glory. In some deep sense Achilles realizes that he and Hector is the same. Achilles realizes that just as he dragged the body of Hector around the city, so he is being dragged by fate around and around until he will be just as dead, and will experience the underworld. When Odysseus sees him in the underworld Achilles says he would rather be a slave than dead. Achilles actions make it possible for the Acheaens to enslave the Trojans, but Achilles is saying he would just as soon as lost and been enslaved rather than become a shade within hades, like the other shades that Odysseus meets. Thus Achilles says he should have made the choice for long obscure death with no glory rather than the choice he made, now that he knows the truth of death. But either way Achilles would have died, and so it is ultimately a false choice. Everywhere we turn when it comes to Achilles we confront some aspect of his existence which is nihilistic. In truth, he was meant to be a golden child because he was fated to be greater than his father, so because of that the Gods agreed not to make love to Thetis, and they arranged the marriage to Peleus instead. He could have been a God, if one of the Great Gods had mated with his mother, but their agreement to each leave her alone, and to give her to a human, fated Achilles to die and thus stole immortality from him. It is the Gods who are golden. They do not tarnish, but the ones of them to experience death in spite of their immortality were the ones to give rise to the golden child below the earth.

One of the differences between the Iliad and Odyssey is the account of what happen to Helen’s brothers, and why they did not participate in her rescue. One says that they are dead above ground and the other says they are alive underground. This is a very interesting statement because it alludes to the difference between the son of Achilles and the Golden Child. If you are above ground you will taste death, but if you stay below ground you will continue to live. In stead of her brothers Helen is rescued by her husband and his brother, this shows the difference between Matriarchy and Patriarchy in action. Matriarchy is represented by Demeter and Persephone, while Patriarchy is represented by the agreement as to who Thetis should marry by the Patriarchs. On the other hand strife who was not invited to the wedding sows discord by throwing into the gathering a golden apple into the gathering which had inscribed on it “To the most beautiful”. Paris is chosen to make the choice between the goddesses, and he chooses Aphrodite’s bribe over the bribes of the other goddesses. And this choice between the three sets off the events that lead to the War. So a human is given this choice of the most beautiful, and he accepts the bribe that gives him the most beautiful, who is Helen. Paris makes a fateful choice which sets the stage for the fateful choice of Achilles who chose short life with glory as did Hector. Helen and Thetis had no choice as how their fates were allotted to them, one by the patriarchs agreeing about who she should marry, and the other by the Goddess who won the Beauty contest who gave her as a bribe and thus took her away from her husband.

There is in Greek myth almost an infinite horizon that we can explore in this way giving ever deeper meaning to the great deed of Achilles of embodying nihilism but realizing it within his companions when it was manifest in their action, and although his response was nihilistic, this little glimpse of self-consciousness concerning the nihilistic situation he was in within the Western worldview, shows against Hegel that Achilles did not have to become a slave to realize the essential nature of his existence and the worldview that he was within which is suffused with nihilism though and through and thus the fate of Achilles is the same as our own who are the inheritors of this strange, unique and onefold worldview that is the gift to us of the Indo-Europeans who all had Neanderthal DNA unlike the people who did not leave africa. And so those who did not leave Africa who are the brunt of racism, are in fact the only true humans and the rest of us, like the Indo-Europeans are hybrids of humans and Neanderthal humanoid species. Could the battle of the devas and asuras, or olympians and titans be a remnant of the battle between the new humans and the Neanderthal at the threshold of the Garden of Eden, i.e. Africa. The humans wandered out of Africa and were met by the Neanderthal already living in the Middle East in in Europe. Humans may have been enslaved at this threshold by the Neanderthal and eventually broke free and established themselves all over the globe taking the neanderthal and human distinction with them as they set up various new homelands. So interesting that Aryans believe that they are the superior race when they along with all of us outside of Africa are really the bastard children of Neanderthals and Humans mixed. Only the Africans are not half-breeds even though they have been the brunt of racism since the beginning of time. This irony is so deep it is almost difficult to maintain ones dignity in the face of it. We have greatly wronged the most human amongst us throughout the ages. Such is the nature of the hybrid creatures we are . . . Perhaps Nietzsche’s ubermen who are closer to the earth are merely the African Humans who we have never recognized for their intrinsic truth of being intrinsically and essentially more human than ourselves, i.e. those from outside of Africa. The distinctions between kinds of human may have resulted in the theory seen in myth that there are different gods for the different species. At one time there were at least five species of humanoids on the planet together. And it just so happens that there are five meta-levels of the negation of existence (as with the meta-levels of Being). In other words there are five different kinds of Being, that are essentially different, and these are the obverse of five different kinds of non-Existence.

Let us think for a while about these civilizations on the threshold of Africa in the Middle East. The sumerians were unique with respect to their whole language as there is none other like it that we know. Egyptians were what was left of the people who migrated from north africa when the Sahara became a desert, so they are the remnant of the Berbers that also still exist in Morocco, a truly lost race buried for the most part under the sand except for those who made it to Egypt. Then there are the semites who were unique in worshiping one God and making contracts with that God. And finally there is the Indo-Europeans who have the uniqueness of Being within their language. All these groups in this area have something unique about them. And it is out of the interaction of these various worlds that the Western worldview was forged in the Middle East. These four worldviews with their unique characteristics combined into the Meta-worldview which has become the Western meta-worldview that has become dominant. And interestingly it is precisely at this point that humans encountered already indigenous Neanderthals and mixed with them somehow. It is interesting that the world dominant worldview has come out of precisely this area. And something that these various worldviews shared in different ways was the idea of generations of Gods, but it is the Indo-Europeans who had the idea that these various generations actually warred on each other so that sons displaced fathers. It is also interesting that the Gods have sex with humans to produce half-breed heros. I will not continue along these lines but I am sure you get the idea that perhaps the human-neanderthal mixture had wider repercussions than we had imagined previously.

Hector is the true hero of the Iliad, which is part of its irony. It is not a matter of two people writing these two epics assigned to Homer, but that they were part of an Epic tradition of which we only have two original epics out of the set:

• Titanomachy — does not exist
• Jason and the Argonauts — later version exists
• Gathering of the Heros — Inviting the Achaeans to the venture against Troy — no longer exists
• Iliad — original
• After the Iliad — the rest of the Trojan war, late version exists
• Odyssey — original
• Odysseus’ land journey — does not exist

So you can see we are lucky to have the parts we do have, and the late versions that were reconstructed of two of them. We only have 4% of the Greek corpus.

Now in my opinion the only way to get a handle on what is going on in these Epics we do have is to read as many commentaries as possible which I have tried to pursue. And when you do that you see that these are really extraordinary books about the nature of the Western worldview. And they are about the key feature of the Western worldview pointed out by Nietzsche and Heidegger which is the production of nihilism in our worldview. And these epics address this question of nihilism in very interesting ways.

It is not a matter of liking Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Paris, or Ajax, etc but a matter of appreciating what they represent as the range of human responses to living in a world where sieges were the norm. Greeks were continually fighting and taking each other’s cities and enslaving the inhabitants of other cities, or being enslaved themselves. It was a Greek city devour Greek city world. And the Iliad shows an example of this primal struggle between city states. Within that context men who were in battle sought Glory. And the various characters in the Iliad show us the various approaches to Glory, or Infamy that could be taken.

Achilles is the focus of the epic because he is the one who realizes the nihilism of the situation of continual war. One has to remember that Helen was really almost a goddess and thus a prize that was worth fighting over. Helen it is said had five lovers. And this is because she is the same person as Draupadi in the Mahabharata. Once we realize that the story of the Iliad and Odyssey is the same as the story of the Mahabharata then we begin to see that it is an echo of an ancient Indo-European tale. What is interesting is that it appears that the Iliad and Odyssey are more archaic than the Mahabharata. It was one of Dumazil’s students that realized that the Mahabharata was the projection on the human plane of the war between the Devas and Asuras, i.e. the missing myth behind the songs of praise in the Vedas. And this is equivalent to the Titomachia which unfortunately we lost in Greek world as well. The war between Troy and the Achaeans is an echo of that first war of the gods on the Human plane as is the Mahabharata. Once we realize this, then we can appeal to both Epics to reinforce each of them. Interestingly the Pandavas are the those we are meant to identify with in the Mahabharata, and they are fighting the 100 brothers born from a stone. When we look into it we see that these men of earth who are evil in the Mahabharata are the Achaeans of the Iliad. And so fortunately the two Epics are from two different points of view, and this really helps us in our trying to understand the more primordial epic which is the source of both of them. I have written about this in my book Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void (http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer).

Another key point is that the War at the end of the Mahabharata is equivalent to the killing of the Suitors in the Odyssey, and thus the wars are different. The Iliad war was told in India as the Ramayana their other major epic which basically has the same story as the Iliad but is much more idealized, so much so that it does not give us much of a hint what the original story was about as much as the Iliad does. Basically there are two wars, one at the beginning of time and one at the end of time. The one at the end of time is preserved in the Norse mythology, and the one at the beginning of time was the one between the Gods, these two wars get ramified and echoed in human conflict as we see in the Ramayana/Mahabharata and Iliad/Odyssey. Another landmark is the Trojan horse is the same as the dice game which is lost and in which Draupadi was disrobed, but that become impossible. Once you know these markers you can figure out the parallels between the epics pretty much on your own. In both cases the heroes are the sons of the Gods. It is interesting that the Achaeans are not the Pandavas because they had all these myths of being born from the earth just as the cousins of the Pandavas were born from a stone. Basically these are what Plato called men of Earth. This also shows why the Achaeans are portrayed in such a bad light, even though they are the group from whose point of view the war is told, and it also indicates why Hector is the real hero of the epic.

Both Achilles and Odysseus in their respective Epics confront nihilism. Achilles shows us the problem of nihilism and Odysseus offers us a solution even though he is such a tricky and unsavory character driven by his stomach as the story says over and over. Odysseus is descended from Prometheus who was also a trickster. So there is good reason for his being portrayed in this less than perfect light. But for all his shortcomings he is a hero and one favored by the gods and he is the one who goes deepest into the core of the Western worldview on his sea journey attempting to solve the problem of Nihilism discovered so poignantly by Achilles. Achilles represents the one who is ensnared by Nihilism as was Odysseus where Hector is the Glorious Hero who defends his city to the death as all the Greeks were suppose to do. If even foreigners act like Hector then the Greeks should act even more glorious and noble a manner in battle. Also since Troy was on Asia Minor the Trojans were seen as non-Greek, and so the epic in a way can also be read in terms of the struggles between the Greeks and Persians that came later even though that is anachronistic, because the Greeks did show themselves as glorious in their wars against the Persians when they were invaded instead of being the invaders.

We should not so much go on how we feel about the characters as seeing them as part of the spectrum of human experience in the face of War and Nihilism which were both endemic to the Western worldview, and still are.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson in the chapter “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism”.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjpmgoncalves.home.sapo.pt%2Ftextos%2Fthe_cybernetics_of_self.doc&rct=j&q=bateson%20cybernetics%20of%20the%20self&ei=QCAqTvPSJaLSiALw9aiwAg&usg=AFQjCNE2VFcSBQa67QIAXuBYcM5gh8mZvw&sig2=U9vuTIysR_enSC-R9ijRBg

Here are the relevant passages from the essay . . .

“Thus, in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.”

“Similarly, we may say that “mind” is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system—man plus environment.”

“The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, “thinks” and “acts” and “decides,” is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the “self” or “consciousness”; and it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the thinking system and the “self” as popularly conceived:

(1) The system is not a transcendent entity as the “self” is commonly supposed to be.
(2) The ideas are immanent in a network of causal pathways along which transforms of difference are conducted. The “ideas” of the system are in all cases at least binary in structure. They are not “impulses” but “information.”
(3) This network of pathways is not bounded with consciousness but extends to include the pathways of all unconscious mentation—both autonomic and repressed,neural and hormonal.
(4) The network is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. It also includes those effective differences which are immanent in the “objects” of such information. It includes the path ways of sound and light along which travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other people—and especially in our own actions.”
“The so-called “Body-Mind” problem is wrongly posed in terms which force the argument toward paradox: if mind be supposed immanent in the body, then it must be transcendent. If transcendent, it must be immanent. And so on.”

The idea of Bateson is that the Self is more than just the body but a cybernetic circuit that reaches beyond the body into the environment. Because of that the mind/body duality is a misconception that produces the transcendent/immanent duality, and that what is really going on is an interchange in a cybernetic circuit that reaches beyond us and is neither immanent or transcendent.

Basically he is saying that the mind/body duality which takes the body’s boundary as the limit of our self creates a double bind which does not allow us to actually assign transcendent nor immanent without them cycling between each other in an oscillation. G. Spencer Brown makes a similar point with regard to circuits in electronics from which he derives his boundary logic. N. Hellerstein in Delta and Diamond logics. Hellerstien shows that there are two limiting paradoxes in the G. Spencer-Brown logic, and in DELTA he reduces these to one. But knowing that paradoxes come naturally in pairs in DIAMOND logic helps, because we can see that two contradictions give us a paradox and two paradoxes give us an absurdity. So let us say we see the body as the locus of Mind rather than a circuit of information feedback with the environment. Then according to Bateson we are trapping the mind within this locus without giving it any possibility of explanation. The mind suddenly is the dual of the body and must be transcendental because we cannot find it anywhere. On the other hand if we see the mind as Immanent in the body, then it is unclear how it can be just in the brain because our mind indwells in our whole body. So either the mind is a transcendental as Descartes thought which is outside extension as the Cogito, or it is within the body in which it is locatable only in the brain and thus it does not explain our experience as beings in the world as Heidegger would say. But if we see the self as going beyond the body out into the environment or the ego being an interconnection with the whole body and not just a mind trapped in a brain, then this larger conception of information flow breaks the paradox of dualism that results in Brain/Mind, or Body/Mind dualisms that generate paradoxes within our tradition, because there is no grounding for these dualisms and they collapse together when taken to be absolute.

So for instance in Kant there are three transcendentals, Ego, God, Object. God keeps in sync the subject’s experiences and the noumena. Ego and Object as transcendentals are the extremes of the subject/object dichotomy. And the only way we can think that they are kept in sync is by the activity of God as deus ex machina. When the transcendentals are separated from each other in this way radically then it is impossible to see how to get them together again. This problem appears in Husserl as his idea of Bracketing. And it was only later that he realized that one could take the world as the ultimate horizon and solve the problem of solipsism and the noumena in one fell swoop and which Heidegger took advantage of in Being and Time with the idea of Dasein as pre-objective and pre-subjective projector of apriori synthesis as being-in-the-world embedded always already in the Mitsein (They).

Why do dualisms generate paradoxes? This is because dualisms are extreme artificial differences, that are not really differences, which are nihilistic. The extremes collapse together making a mixture that cannot be separated out again. This is why the limit for thought in our tradition is contradiction, paradox or absurdity. This is the limit of the Divided line on the side of Doxa. What we forget is that there is the other limit on the side of Ratio which is the Supra-Rational. The Supra-Rational is when two things are not mixed but occur at the same time without mixing. The Supra-Rational is made up of non-nihilistic distinctions, like the distinctions that Plato makes between the source-forms. Dualism is when there are two artificial extreme opposites that tend to collapse together and mix and there is nothing that keeps them apart in a grounded fashion, nothing that is like Plato says that allows us to cut through the joint rather than the bone. In dualism there is a struggle between these artificial extreme opposites that are nihilistic where one tries to become dominate over the other and destroy it utterly.

A good example of this is the ideologies that fought it out in the last century. Capitalism won this battle with the two extremes of Fascism and Communism. But Capitalism was transformed in the process. And so now we have globalization because these other ideologies are no longer a threat to world stability. Fascism and Communism were both totalitarian systems based on mass movements, and this is why western intellectuals are so suspicious of the masses, and mass movements (cf Cannetti, Crowds and Power). Totalitarian Mass movements are a danger to the individualization of Capitalism. In capitalism the mass is a market. Both Fascism and Communism attempted to produce a society based on either the proletariat, the mass of workers who should own them means of production, or the Volk which is a nationalist image of the folk of a country to produce a kind of socialism where the wealth is shared by he people based on their race and their connection to the fatherland. One source of the mass is the production capability of the workers and the other is the language and culture and history of a people. Capitalism attempts to atomize individuals with private property laws, and then treat them as a mass as they interact with the commodity market. Baudrillard in his book Mirror of Production shows that communism and capitalism share the same assumption that people are made to be productive, and life without productivity is seen as empty and worthless. Fascism bases socialism on the genetic roots of the people and attempts to get rid of anyone who is not of those same genetic roots.

“Nazism promoted an economic Third Position; a managed economy that was neither capitalist nor communist. The Nazis accused communism and capitalism of being associated with Jewish influences and interests.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

From the point of view of the Nazis it was capitalism and communism that were the nihilistic opposites because the real basis of judgement for them was race.

From the point of view of the Communists both the Nazis and the Capitalists believed in private property and exploitation of the working class.

From the point of view of the Capitalists Nazism and Communism were ideological extremes and Capitalism saw itself as Non-Ideological and supporting Freedom and Liberty from Totalitarianism.

Each of the three ideologies, which in Orwell’s 1984 were portrayed as continually at war with each other continually changing sides saw itself as the middle between the other two. As the winners of this century long conquest we can now portray the fascists and communists as the nihilistic opposites but it was not always this clear when the world was still up for grabs. But what Fasicsm and Communism shared was Totalitarianism in which everyone was in thrall to a supreme leader (Hitler, Stalin) and there was no rule of law, and in fact it was a Napoleonic type of regime of secular sovereignty where the oligarchic party rules, like in China today.

Now we are in a situation where our economy is being shaped by our interaction with China as it has been shaped by our interaction with the Middle East dictatorships. This is seen in the relation of China to Walmart. China is pure capitalism unchecked. In communism the owner of production is the state. China is keeping up its GNP by constructing cities that stand empty after construction. This is maintained by a kind of petrol-dollar arrangement where we borrow money to buy Chinese goods and then they buy US bonds with it and thus finance our debt. But the Chinese cannot go on building cities that no one lives in, and we cannot go on creating greater and greater debt. Eventually something catastrophic will happen in the global markets probably far worse than the Financial crisis based on packaging and reselling sub-prime loans. But this situation that now exists with our major global competitor which is rapidly becoming a technological and economic power house is of course nihilistic. And what Bateson is suggesting is that it is in the Petrol-Dollars and the Walmart Dollars and this virtuous circulation that in both cases undermines our economy, that the self lies, not in the individuals partaking in the exchange, but in the exchange circuit itself. So there is no transcendental ideology associated with any of regimes as they claimed in the last century, nor is there the immanence of the romantic genetic source of the folk, but rather there is the global economic circulation that defines all the players in the game from Bateson’s point of view.

The nihilistic opposites collapse into each other but then produce paradoxical limits when they mix with each other. These dual paradoxes then are the basis for the generation of a new set of artificial extreme opposites that separate themselves from the paradoxes so that the paradoxes collapse back into absurdity. This is the real dialectic of history within the Western Worldview that works out as Hegel’s absolute reason in history.

So fascism came out of the economic plight of Germany after WWI, where reparations were too onerous. Germany was a hot bed of both Communist and Fascist activity because it was one of the most industrialized countries, Communism was a reaction to Robber Baron capitalism, and Fascism was a reaction to the disgrace of the German people after WWI and the romantic appeal to their common roots as Indo-Europeans based on Aryan racism and the Philology that studied Indo-European origins. But because both were mass movements tending toward totalitarianism they immediately faced off against each other especially after the Fascists took over Germany and the Communists took over Russia. The street battles between Fascists and Communists in Germany were now played out on a continental stage. Germany took Poland to get living room as a buffer between itself and Russia. The fascists around the world formed an Axis to prevent the spread of Communism and moved to take over Europe in a bid to prevent any of its countries from becoming communist and in an attempt to create a block that could withstand an attack from Russia with its vast resources. So although Fascism and Communism had different roots, but they were the same in terms of being totalitarian mass movements of a Napoleonic character, i.e. with secular sovereignty. So these are nihilistic opposites because they are really the same in terms of being mass ideological movements. Capitalism saw instead individualism as the ideal with private rather than state owned or directed enterprise and represented the mass as markets.

Now what happened was that the Russians became our Allies of necessity against the Fascists Axis powers. And instead of the Russians and Germans destroying one another, the Allies won which allowed Spain as a fascist state (because it remained neutral) and Russia as a communist state (because it was a necessary ally) to survive. So then after WWI the new stand off was between the Nato Allies and the Soviets. So the nihilistic opposites did not cancel as we might have expected, but instead an asymmetry was produced where the capitalists had to stand up against the Communists across the globe, after the fascists were defeated. Now since an asymmetry occurred historically the two nihilistic opposites did not cancel each other out by mutual destruction or by Monistic dominance of one over the other. So the paradoxically was also lopsided. One aspect of that was that we were allies with the Communist resistance in France, and so after the war, communism was strong in France, and in effect all the intellectuals were communist. This meant that there were communist intellectuals not under Soviet control, who could think freely since they were part of a republic recreated by the British and Americans. This prevalence of Communism within the Republic of France after the war led to a great deal of creative intellectual activity. And we have them to thank for preserving and developing further continental philosophy. But Ironically all this development took place based on the work of Heidegger who was a Nazi, who after the war was prevented from speaking and talking in public for years. Heidegger was even denounced by Jaspers who saw him as a danger even after the war. So Heidegger went on with his philosophizing in private and continued to publish enigmatic essays. So it is fascinating to me that Heidegger’s survival of the War and the Communist resistance in France combined to produce an astounding intellectual legacy. This is one of the paradoxes that communism and fascism combined to give us Continental Philosophy with its penchant for revolution as fostered by Sartre. But what we saw in Cambodia was also very telling which as a mass genocide undertaken by French trained intellectuals back in their homeland after training in France. Pol Pot was the quintessential product of the French Philosophy, just as the French Revolution was for Hegel the result of Kantian philosophy.

Bernard-Henri Lévy has an interesting take on this, he says that after Pol Pot some of the French intellectuals realized that Revolution always entailed genocide, and so the whole idea of the advocacy of revolution such as that of Sartre needs to be rethought. This is because ideologies tend to want to eliminate everyone who does not fit the stereotype that they advocate. So the French intellectuals in promoting revolution around the world and communism, even if it was not Soviet brand communism, were implicated in genocide, similar to the terror that occurred after the French Revolution. This extreme drive to purity that leads to genocide paradoxically unfolds intellectual ideas and the ideologies that are created by these nihilistic opposites into terror and death. This is more or less the inverse of the Mind/Body problem. Here the mind is producing the nihilism that leads to the suffering and death of the masses and their bodies form mass graves in the aftermath of the revolution. The interesting sign is the fact that if you had glasses you were seen as an intellectual and put to death in Cambodia even though it was intellectuals trying to produce a pure paradise who were behind the genocide which was carried out for ideological reasons. Thus the miracle of the intellectual creativity, and island of Communist activity in a capitalist sea, was directly linked to revolution and genocide in the third world, attempting to regain their sovereignty after the breakup of colonialism which is a black hole which is the extreme opposite of the miracle of intellectual ferment happening in Paris.

Now Continental Philosophy squares off against Analytical Philosophy to form another nihilistic pair, one fascinating and the other stiflingly boring, one engaged in the world and offering cultural critique like Zizek does, and the other stranded in dying philosophy departments throughout the US while English majors embrace Continental Philosophy because it helps them interpret the literature that they must write essays about. This schism is the product of the Cold War where Western intellectuals if they were to flourish had to avoid Communism and Politics in general, and had to become specialists rather than remaining generalists as philosophers should do. The Continentals took on Psychoanalysis, Global Politics, and Literature as well as many other subjects making these topics central to their critiques and studies. Analytic Philosophers stuck to boring arguments amongst themselves disconnected from culture and the lifeworld of our times and continued to play their language games. Analytic Philosophy is the result of McCarthyism and blacklists, while Continental Philosophy was the result of Marxist intellectual ferment freed from Soviet Dogma by a historical accident. But these are nihilistic opposites, just as are the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein as Stanley Rosen demonstrates.

Personally I do not like politics, and I am definitely not a historian, but Political History comes up all the time because it is such a perfect example of nihilistic opposites working themselves out in history. Even if you do not like my summary of these historical movements in the last century you can easily think up your own examples. We saw how Fascism had different roots from Communism but because they shared the quality of being Mass Totalitarian movements of the Napoleonic style they immediately faced off with each other and drew all the other nations into their conflict. But due to historical accidents they did not annihilate each other but in fact Fascism was defeated, and Soviet Russia lived on to become a new enemy of Capitalism during the Cold War where the ultimate nihilism occurred which is called Mutually Assured Destruction. But it turned out that we did not destroy each other and the Soviet empire imploded probably due to the Internet. So now we stand in symbiotic relations to China and India, and the Middle East through our policies of Globalization, which is a form of economic self-destruction due to our increasing lack of the means of production, and the continuing trends toward a purely service economy.

The basic idea of Bateson is that it is the flows of transcendentals that are immanent within the cybernetic system, and it is not body boundaries that are linked to transcendentals, but the exchange tokens and the information flows. So for instance BitCoin is a good example. This is a currency based on computation alone. It derives its value from the fact that there are only so many BitCoins in existence, but it needs no central control by financial institutions to flourish. This imaginary money is worth about $13 today. It is the ultimate computational currency where it is actually computational cycles that are the commodity that it is based upon. The Bitcoins are only given reality by their flow, and they carry the history of their transactions with them. Their value is purely transcendental to their flow of exchange, and the immanence of the computations that support that logging of the flow. Each bitcoin is a cryptographic sign, and its significance is diacritical within the plenum of all the existing bitcoins still in circulation. Bitcoins are almost better than stocks as a way to transfer value in the black and drug markets worldwide and for money laundering, because they do not depend on central banks and financial authorities for their generation or maintenance. Thus they are perhaps the first purely virtual exchange which only has value in its exchange with other currencies, which are equally fictitious but already established. Bitcoins is the perfect currency of the General Economy as defined by Bataille in Accursed Share. Restricted Economies have not realized the threat of the General Economy yet, but in actuality a Global Economy by definition has to be a General Economy. That is an economy where the currency is reified contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities of the restricted economies.

Thus we posit that the dialectic that amounts to Hegel’s Absolute Reason in history is one in which dialectical extreme artificial duals do not synthesize but fall together losing their meaning and mixing, and that this spawns dual paradoxes that fall together into Absurdity which in turn produces different Dualisms that are nihilistic which in turn again fall together and produce side effects of dual paradoxes again which again produces absurdity. The contradictions that Hegel sees overcome by Aufhebung is a lower resolution look at this dialectic which reverses it, like a film going backward as the nihilistic duals fall backward into the synthesis of the absurdity rather than arising from it. We can see the absurdity giving rise to the nihilistic opposites, and then as those mix then the twin limiting paradoxes are produced as unintended side-effect, which in turn collapse into absurdity for the cycle to start over again. Running forward we see that at first there are four contradictions that arise as a minimal system from the background of absurdity. The Greimas Square uses the logic of contraries and contradictories to maintain the difference between All, None, Some, Some not. This square has two contradictories crossing in the middle.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/square/
So that means that when the two nihilistic opposites arise from absurdity, they exist as two Greimas or Logical Squares. These are in the position of two universals that negate each other. Each dual wants to say that Every S is P or Q. And it wants to say to the other that No S is Q or P. But ultimately these contraries to each other admit the sub-alterns that Some S is P or Q, and Some S is not Q or P. This particularization that falls away from the All or universal statement and admits mixture is the means by which the two nihilistic duals mix and lose their identity in relation to each other, because they are artificial distinctions with no grounding in nature either human or otherwise. In this process the dual contraries become mixed and produce paradox when they collapse together, and then the two squares collapse together to produce the absurdity as a mass of mixture that they differentiate out of again with another conventional or normative distinction without roots that would make it non-nihilistic. And so it goes the dynamic of
Absolute Reason in Western History following the pattern of the Greimas Square derived from the Logical Square. All we have to do is add Existence, And, and Or that holds between the two opposites and we have logic as we know it.

http://www.quora.com/Nirvana-concept/What-is-nirvana-Can-it-be-obtained-by-a-human-being-and-if-so-how  Nirvana is a key concept in Buddhism but it causes a fundamental and deep problem in Buddhism with which it has struggled throughout its history. To understand how Buddhism got into this situation with a fundamental contradiction at its heart can only be understood if we take into account the evolution of the Buddhist heresy out of the Indo-European worldview in the form of Hinduism. The problem is that Buddhism is derived from the Indo-European worldview which is unique in having Being as a fundamental linguistic concept. Buddhism is a attempt to get away from Being and back to Existence. But the unfortunate problem is that once you have Being, if you try to return to existence, it does not mean you can return to the pristine state prior to the advent of Being. This is fundamental problem that once you are sullied with the illusory nature of Being you cannot return directly to a pristine state directly. This is part of the insidious nature of Maya. In some way, it is this contradiction that has made Buddhism so deep. if it did not have this contradiction that comes from its source in Hinduism then it would not nearly be as interesting philosophically. Because Buddhism has struggled with this fundamental contradiction at its core that it takes from Hinduism its depth is much greater. The basic problem is that Buddhism says that things are empty, especially the self, that they do not have Being (Sat). Yet the Buddha also accepted Karma which is a metaphysical kind of causality across lives through reincarnation and offers the escape from this wheel of Samsara (Birth and Death) as Nirvana (cessation). The basic contradiction is how can there be causation when everything is empty? There is no substantive basis to carry the causation, yet the struggle for freedom from Karma is the central drive that pushes Buddhists toward the realization of Nirvana. To understand this we need to go back to Hinduism. In Hinduism the Self has Being which gives it eternal continuity as Atman. Thus reincarnation is cycles of being for all living things and where you are in the great chain of Being is dependent on what you did in past lives. The reason that this exists in Hinduism is because it prevents the Gods from being blamed for ones fate in ones life. In other words it turns the responsibility for ones fate back on oneself. This argument that deflects responsibility from the gods has the and puts it in the individuals own past history, which they cannot control, means that fate becomes something one has manufactured oneself, and therefore there is no reason to pity someone who has brought their fate back on themselves from their own activity across infinite lives. Ironically this is what Nietzsche called Eternal Return. Eternal Return for Nietzsche was a measure for the worthwhileness of life that was not dependent on any transcendental like God. Notice that if the Gods are not responsible for Fate then really they are not needed anymore. Nietzsche said that we should live our lives such that if we do things in our life in such a way that if we were to live our lives over eternally we would not regret or get bored with what we have done. This is sort a kind of Golden Rule for oneself that does not involve our relation to others. It is a basis on which to judge our lives that depends on no transcendental entity, but merely timelessness over multiple reincarnations. Karma is the other way around because it says that we will be in different kinds of lives with different fates in those lives depending on what we did in other lives, and the reason that can happen is that there is the Substance of Being that guarantees the continuity of the Soul. Nietzsche converts this into a speculative pure repetition that does not need Karma but instead sees existence as a kind of repetition compulsion. Zizek says that the great discoveries of Freud and Kierkegaard was their views of the centrality of repetition. And so we can see that Nietzsche also has a part to play in the comprehension that repetition has some interesting repercussions as we see in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Now we can see that in Hinduism the Gods have really become irrelevant in someway because they have given up their control of the fates of men, but also we can see that in Hinduism there is an infinite weight of Being that each self carries with their own determination of their own fate across many lives. It is this infinite weight of Karma on individual human beings that Buddhism attempts to solve, by saying that the Continuity of Being (Sat) does not exist and the self is empty, and the realization of that brings about Nirvana or the cessation of the wheel of birth and death. Buddhism could not solve the problem for Hindus of the infinite pressure on them for their fate if they denied Karma any reality, if the solution of Nirvana (escape) is to be real, the problem (Karma) has to be real. And so this reality of Karma as a problem that gives rise to the reality of Nirvana as a solution go hand in hand. But because the solution is based on the realization of the emptiness of the cycle itself, but also because it is clear that life goes on after reaching Nirvana until ones death (Pari-nirvana) then the very basis for Karma is negated and yet it is accepted as real because otherwise Nirvana its cessation could not be real. Solving this enigma have kept Buddhist philosophers busy for centuries. And we can learn a lot about our own worldview, which is there worldview by studying their answers to this problem. It is basically a problem that only comes up in the Indo-European worldview with Being, and so the fact that Buddhism is an offshoot from the Hindu worldview means that Buddhism by providing an answer to a problem within the Indo-European worldview takes some of the Indo-European worldview into itself even though it is trying to leave Being behind. Saying that Being does not exist still calls attention to it, and thus does not escape its traces completely. What happens is that despite the rejection of Being, Buddhism remains with traces of Nihilism within its core despite its focus on non-duality. Once Being arises you cannot just immediately return to existence without carrying some of the infection of maya, dunya, dukkah with you back into existence. In this sense there is no direct way our of Being once you have become ensnared in its illusions. Because if this there is great doubt that many Western practitioners of Buddhism ever actually get out of this maze, but in most cases they remain in some sort of rarefied self-delusion. But on the other hand because Buddhism arises directly from the Indo-European worldview of Hinduism it is also perfectly applicable to the Western worldview and thus it is a genuine path toward non duality for Westerners who want to escape the duality of existence emphasized by Western culture throughout its history. However, because this way comes from the Indo-European worldview it is particularly suited for us as Westerners but also it does itself not escape completely the problematic of the Western worldview either particularly its nihilism. Buddhism remains fundamentally nihilistic in spite of its seeking nonduality as a state of existence. And in fact as I say in another answer it in fact uses nihilism of the worldview against itself to provide the leap to Nirvana. So Buddhism is essentially selling us our own snake oil back in different bottles believing that two wrongs do make a right, but unfortunately this is not exactly true and the slight asymmetry causes us not to actually be able to return to existence unsullied by Being. Now that we have some inkling of the problem that Buddhism attempts to solve, we need to understand the solution. Buddhists themselves realized fairly quickly that the Buddhist goal of Nirvana had the flaw of Selfishness, in other words I sought to become an Arhat and leave Samsara and do not mind if others continue to be ensnared. So it was realized fairly soon that another ideal, that of the Bhodhisattva was actually higher because it did not carry the taint of selfishness that could be posited of the Buddha’s positing Nirvana for oneself alone as the goal. The rise of this higher goal of the Mahayana, by being someone who swears to leave the circle of birth and death last after helping all others escape, appears lower on the scale from Buddhahood. Mahayana is the greater vehicle because it takes everyone to Cessation (not just one empty self at a time), and the holiest are those that wait the longest to enter the state of cessation. Another problem in early Buddhism that Mahayana solved was the fact that early Buddhists and probably the Buddha said only the Self was empty but there were about a hundred other dharmas (tattvas) had real Being. Eventually it was realized that for Buddhism to be self -consistent all dharmas had to be empty. As time went by Buddhism step by step erased the various inconsistencies in early Buddhism and in the process Buddhism became a very sophisticated philosophical approach to existence as nondual. But this nonduality was approached on the basis of a fundamental duality in the nature of truth. There are two truths, one is that of the mundane world, and the other is the world of enlightenment where nirvana is realized by the individual who then comes back into the world and lives as an enlightened being. The fact that there are these two truths, mundane and super-mundane is a fundamental belief of Buddhism. But it is no wonder that eventually a higher kind of Buddhism would come along which would challenge the two truths. And in fact there were several of these, the most interesting of which is DzogChen of Manjushrimitra and Mipham. Manjushrimitra turns Nagarjuna’s logic back against Buddhism producing a second order heresy that denies the two truths, and point out its dualism and nihilism. DzogChen is considered the highest form of Buddhism by the Tibetans. It is a kind of Buddhism that leaves Buddhism behind and is practiced by the Bon (in Tibet like the Taoist, Shinto) as well as the Buddhists. In DzogChen we come full circle finally and return to a pristine state, after carrying the infection of Being over into the Nondual on the way our of it. And this is a fundamental lesson. Getting out of Maya, Dunya, Dukkha is not so easy as just taking a nondual stance toward existence, one must get rid of the traces of nihilism that are left over from being in existence as well. So there is actually four different states:

• Taoism – Void existence prior to the introduction of Being.
• Duality within a World suffused by Being created by Indo-Europeans uniquely
• Non-Dual Emptiness that is still nihilistic even without Being in Buddhism
• The extraction of nihilism from nondual emptiness in DzogChen’s manifestation.

The key point is that all these are different states and the fact that DzogChen negates the nihilism still endemic to Buddhism despite its claims to nonduality of emptiness does not mean that the primordial void has been returned to in the pristine way in which we departed from it when we created Being. However the sate that DzogChen proposes appears very similar to the state of Void in Taoism. One way to talk about this is to realize that Taoist Void and Buddhist Emptiness are different from each other and that they are in fact dual-nonduals. What DzogChen gets at is a deeper nonduality of manifestation prior to the distinction between emptiness and void created by the institution of Being. I think the Shakyamuni Buddha and the history of Buddhism producing enlightened Beings as we can see from their works that are left to us and perhaps direct perception upon meeting them, is existential evidence that Nirvana can be obtained by Human beings. However, Nirvana itself is not the goal for Mahayana Buddhism but instead the saving of all Human Beings from Samsara. So the escape from the world goal has been replaced by an indirect goal of helping others to escape from the wheel of Samsara and then escaping last, using one’s incarnations to work toward the salvation of everyone from Dukkah. Those who settle for the lesser and more selfish goal of Nirvana are called Arhats, and they are seen as a necessary step toward the Bodhisattva ideal, but their perfection is limited by their desire to leave the world before others. It is the difference between the Crew and the Captain of a sinking ship. The crew escape as they can but the Captain is suppose to make sure everyone else is off the ship before they abandon ship. The Buddha and his pari-nirvana was necessary for the gaol of complete enlightenment to be manifest in the world, but soon after that it was realized that a higher goal for those who claimed self-lessness (an-atman) was to vow to be last of the sinking ship of this world. As for how to attain Nirvana take your pick of the many ways to enlightenment that appear in Buddhism. In Buddhism one always says that a particular path is just a little more right than the others, in other words they are all right, but some are more right than others in the view of their adherents. But as I have said in other posts, Enlightenment in Buddhism has all the trappings of a sophistry, because it is a way of tricking oneself into giving up the self, by becoming completely committed to the goal of achieving enlightenment and then realizing that this goal and the self that pursues it are both empty. So basically enlightenment as being as you are, before you set out to become enlightened. However, the journey is everything, and the two states are not actually in practice the same although they are theoretically the same. There is an asymmetry between the state prior to the seeking of enlightenment and the state after achieving it, even though the two ideally are exactly the same. Going back to our analogy of the sinking ship, it is as if you invested all of your self in the goal of achieving enlightenment and when you realize that both the self and the goal are empty, then the self, as it were goes down with the ship because there is no escape once one has fully committed to the project of becoming enlightened. One merely realizes one day that ordinary consciousness is in fact enlightenment. This is like the realization that although everything at a macro scale is ruled by entropy, the actual atoms out of which things are made are eternal and suffer no entropy. These are two views of things that are very different. From the point of view of Entropy everything is suffering the dukkaha of disorganization over time which causes pain and suffering and eventually death in living things. But from the point of view of non-entropy, what everything is made up of at the atomic level is eternal, and suffers no entropy. And thus if you consider yourself as an aggregate and in continual flux there is in fact only perfection that lives on eternally everywhere, and when your cells turn over in your body, or you die actually nothing happens, the same atoms migrate within the universe and get caught up in other beings in an endless cycle because the constituent atoms are eternal, unless they happen to fall into a supernova or blackhole or some other physical process that causes their elemental nature to change. So the ship goes down, and the sailors and captain become part of the sea, but the sea goes on indefinitely. Now my point in this answer has been that the realization of emptiness of self and all things, is only a small part of a larger story which includes the fact that although Buddhism gets rid of Being, it does not get rid of the Nihilism inscribed in Being completely. This is not to say that Buddhism is Nihilistic because no nondual way is nihilistic as long as it shows us how to make non-nihilistic distinctions, i.e. is genuinely nondual. But structurally there is still a dualism affirmed by Buddism in spite of its affirmation of nonduality and that is the two truths. What Manjushrimitra does is critique Buddhsim in the way that Nagarjuna critiqued Dualism previously. It turns out that Buddhism is susceptible to that critique, and in fact the state of emptiness is not the whole picture because it has a dual which is the Void which is prior to the arising of Being, such as we see in Taoism and presumably Shinto, and Bon too originally, where nature is seen as the measure of all things even humans and their consciousness and their society. The nondual version of this is called Wu Wei. Since there is no Being in Taoism as expressed in Chinese there is no emptiness. At first the Chinese thought that emptiness and void were the same thing. But eventually they learned that they were different as they got to know Buddhism better. And then after that they attempted to synthesize the two. An excellent example of this is the poetry of Stonehouse translated by Red Pine (http://www.kyotojournal.org/interviews/redpine.html), where there are empty lines interspersed with void lines in the poetry which is a really amazing thing to read and try to understand the difference between void and emptiness as defined by the hermit poet who was zen master and taoist both. The fact that there is a difference between emptiness and void can be understood in terms of Domain Walls in Physics in which there are differences between different regions of empty space when it is considered to act like a Bose-Einstein Condensate. We can also understand it mathematically as the difference between the line prior to the one from which a Pascal Triangle arises, and the space between the ones which is empty within the triangle. Undifferentiated space outside is different from differentiated space inside, and especially when the inward space is seen as the substrate of consciousness in itself. So once we realize that emptiness and void are different then we can see how the DzogChen move of Manjushrimitra does not necessarily take us back to the primordial void, but rather takes us down to another deeper level of nonduality in which the difference between emptiness and void, inward and outward is lost, or better has not been established yet. So Manjushrimitra hints at the fact that there is a deeper nonduality beyond the dual non-duals of emptiness/void which are straited and unstraited. This question of the deeper nonduality is also raised in Tien Tai and Huan Yen Buddhism in different ways. It is also raised when we consider the difference between the heresies of Buddhism and Jainism. It is my theory that Mahayana buddhism arose out of the combination of the views of nonduality of these two heresies. That is probably wrong but it is an interesting thought. This begs the question how many layers of these higher logical types of nonduality are there? This is of course an open question. Where we see this addressed is not so much in DzogChen which seems to have lost its way until Mipham but in Islam, the nondual heresy of the Western worldview which develops within Sufism a way of looking at these deeper levels of nonduality calling them Sifat and Dhat. But once we understand that reference we can read it back into other Buddhist paths and see that there are probably many of these paths that are misunderstood because they are actually refering to a different meta-level of nonduality than they were originally thought to refer to in a theoretical world in which there is only one kind of nonduality, i.e. emptiness, or there are two as in later chinese buddhism where Taoism and Buddhist ways are distinguished and synthesized. To obtain these deeper states of nonduality you must first understand that they exist from a theoretical point of view, and this negates the idea that emptiness is no-mind because we need our rational faculties as well as our sensory faculties to understand nonduality. Non-duality is defined by the tetralemma which is a logical structure, it is what is other than the four logical positions of the tetralemma. Here we can use some ideas of Kant to make the distinction between conceptual understanding and pure intuition. Synthetic Aprioris like space and time are pure intuitions in Kant. So we can think of prajna as a pure intuition as well. While Kant is talking about physical space, which is identical to the void, Buddhism is taking about the emptiness of consciousness and considers physical space an illusion. From a Buddhist perspective there is also a synthetic apriori that is inward that is received from the whole of consciousness experienced as white light without any interference from substance (i.e. the illusory perduring of Being). It is like the difference between ether and what we think of as empty etherless space of modern physics. When we go beyond logic the only place to go is a singular particular which is spacetime outwardly and consciousness inwardly. Formally the point of view of Buddhism and Taoism these two are completely different. But DzogChen has the mantra Mind is like Space. In other words they are pointing out that space and emptiness of consicoiusness are really the same thing in some sense, and thus inward and outward nonduality are really the same manifestation. Void is prior to the arising of the One (what Badiou calls the Ultra One that arises to close off the Multiple), and emptiness is after the repackaging of the Multiple as the Manifold in Experience. But in terms of manifestation they belong together as the Same (to use a term of Heidegger from Identity and Difference. This difference that makes a difference (Bateson) between the two kinds of nonduality, striated and unstriated, becomes more interesting when we realize that this difference is marked by Ultra Being, the singularity of the externality of Being at the fifth meta-level of Being. This is where we realize that Being and Existence with its two interpretations (empty and void) are interleaved and inseparable. The Indo-Europeans have merely substativized attempting to render it (Maya, Dunya, and Dukkah) perdurant by creating the artificial Being/Having concepts within their language. It is only knowledge that has this kind of perdurence in experience. The Indo-Europeans tried to give the objects of knowledge the same kind of persistence as knowledge itself with the idea of Being, the first and deepest ideology. When we realize that there are different higher logical types of Nonduality, then we can think that nonduality is infinitely deep as Heidegger feared when he uncovered the meta-levels of Being. But just as with Being the finitude of this series is also true of non-existence. However, just as the meta-levels of Being are harder and harder to think (Parmenides said Being and thinking are the same), so to the different levels of Non-existence are also qualitatively different from each other and harder to explain in language, and harder to point to once achieved. But essentially from a theoretical point of view one must delve into the various higher logical types of existence via negation or non-existence, because existence itself is unstriated in relation to Being which is striated by its meta-levels. So it is only via the striations of negation that the higher logical types of nondual existence can be explored.

http://www.quora.com/Philosophy/What-next-after-nihilism

Nihilism is a very important concept. Both Heidegger and Nietzsche spend quite a bit of time on the question of nihilism because they see it as central to our worldview. It is particularly important given the disasters of the twentieth century like World War I, II and the Cold War. It was an extremely ideological century with nihilistic opposites fighting it out on a global scale. All of this just to show that Nietzsche was on to something when he focused on nihilism as the core phenomena within our worldview.

Given all this emphasis on the Question of the nature of nihilism and its integral relation to our worldview, then to ask what is next after nihilism assumes that there is something, after nihilism, which is probably not the case within the dominant western worldview. There are many reasons why nihilism is not going away, and one of them is that nihilism and emergence are duals of each other, and what seems to happen in our worldview is the intensification of emergence and the intensification of Nihilism. These go hand in hand. So one answer to this question is that what is next after nihilism is an emergent event and then a deeper form of nihilism. Nihilism is the lost of meaning, anomie, and so it is the opposite of the production of meaning. The best account of nihilism is that of Stanley Rosen. He explains that Nihilism is when you are caught up in a struggle between two sides (democrats and republicans) and then you realize they are both the same (i.e. it is really incumbents that rule, regardless of party). It is the realization that what we were involved in and cared about so much was really worthless and meaningless. To misquote Bateson nihilism is when there is a difference that makes no difference. If you cannot draw a non-nihilistic distinction then there is no way to produce meaning because all meaning would merely evaporate if there were no well grounded distinctions to base them on. Nihilism ends when there is an Emergent Event, that clears the nihilistic background that is necessary to recognize an emergent event. But after that clearing in Being, then nihilistic noise starts to accrete again and strangely even though we thought things couldn’t get any worse the nihilism intensifies and things get even worse the next time around as we wait for an emergent novum to save us from the darkness of meaninglessness.

The first book on Nihilism was the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (pictured above; seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons) in which there is a young man who is interested in science and thus has given up the traditional ways. He is called a nihilist, but in that book he was really a modernist. But the focus here was the erasure of traditional distinctions by modernity. And since the Middle Ages lasted until 1850 or so in some parts of Europe and especially in Russia, the genesis of Nihilism as a concept has to do with the Enlightenment and the destruction of Feudalism by the Modern State. But a similar thing already happened in Greece in the much greater transition from the Mythopoietic to the Metaphysical eras (See L. J. Hatab Myth and Philosophy).

We are still in the Metaphysical Era and various philosophers want to call it over, but it lingers on as does modernity in the Post-Modern. Heidegger thought he put an end to it by assigning the title of the last metaphysical philosopher to Nietzsche and developing his distinction between Being and Beyng, and the difference between the First Beginning and the Other Beginning and the discovery of Ereignis (happening, appropriation) as a fundamental relation of Dasein to Seyn (Beyng). So another answer to the question as to what comes after Nihilism (and Emergence) is the Emergence of a new Era after the Metaphysical which may have already started. It is hard to tell. I am sure that the Greeks did not know that the Metaphysical Era started with Thales it was something we found out only later when we compared the Greek immersion in a world of mythos and then the arising of natural philosophy and the questioning of the Gods. Heidegger calls the Metaphysical the era of the fleeing of the gods, and he says it will be over then the last god has fled.

This is quite interesting, because in all probability the last god will also be the first god and that first God prior to Uranus was lost in Oblivion until some Hittite documents were found and translated which speak of a god prior to Uranus, who is Alalu. Thus there is a primordial Indo-european God among the Hittites that was lost in oblivion prior to Uranus, Kronos, Zeus who we have recently rediscovered. Putting this with the fact that from a genetic point of view Hittite is the oldest Indo-European language, then it becomes clear that the last god to pass away is probably the first god who was lost in oblivion prior to the Greeks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alalu and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_mythology). Poseidon is the only Indo-European god that the Greeks retained. Most of their gods were formed on a Mesopotamian pattern. Some Hittite gods were also like Mesopotamian gods but they retained more of their Indo-European character, which revolves around a primal battle with a Snake-like monster as with Zeus/Apollo vs. Typhoon/Python. This conflict with between the storm god (like Baal) and the monster snake is the primal scene of the triumph of Being over Existence that we see in St. George and the Dragon.

The primal Hittite God is Alalu whose cup bearer who was also his son, Anu, served him for nine years and betrayed him, and this happened over and over in the Hittite creation lineage of the Gods.

The repetition of the cup bearer who is son overturning the Father and god for successive generations has a profound meaning for our worldview, that is lost in the stories of Uranus being displaced by Kronos, or Kronos by Zeus. It is a primordial example of the Master/Slave dialectic discussed by Hegel. By Master and Slave Hegel means the Roman’s enslavement of the clever Greeks. For Hegel Greek Philosophy starts with the enslaved Greek philosophers and the reflection in philosophy of their slavery which leads to self-consciousness, whereas Hegel says that the Masters can have no self-consciousness because they are lost in Hedonism or their drunken-ness with the assertion of their Power. Nietzsche tries to develop a self-consciousness of the Noble in contrast reversing Hegel. When we know about the way that the Greeks within their slavery conquered their masters though their wit then we see how the Master/Slave dialectic as we see it in Pozo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot plays out in the real world.

The repetition in the dethroning of each successive father by their cup bearer son is like the oscillation between the role of Master and Slave we see in Waiting for Godot.

In Waiting for Godot there is negation of hierarchy and negation of equal relations which is reduced to merely waiting together for one knows not what, i.e. Godot.

For Hegel the history of self-consciousness starts with the enslavement of the Greeks and their interaction with their Masters in which the Greek culture becomes dominant even among the Romans, and that is why so much of Greek culture has survived down to the present, a full 4% of the original corpus. For most of us we think of Greek Philosophy starting with Thales and reaching a pinnacle with Plato and Aristotle and then going back down hill until Modern times starting after Descartes in the modern era. And we can see in Waiting for Godot the quintessential post-modern paradox, which is that we are just waiting for we know not what to come, the next emergent event, the end of the Metaphysical Era, Whatever . . .

Unfortunately what comes after Nihilism . . . is just more Nihilism broken up by an Emergent Event now and again. When the next Era comes for the Western worldview it will in fact be just more of the same, just a bit worse this time. In other words there is Eternal Recurrence of the Same as Nietzsche pointed out. Or repetition that as Zizek says the understanding of which was the contribution of both Kierkegaard and Freud. And ultimately that leads to Difference of Derrida, and the Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. Tomorrow we will still be waiting for Godot and we will encounter the same phenomena as we did yesterday . . .

Amar Ali: It raises a few interesting questions….

• What kind of emergent event are you referring to? Would this be an intellectual event or a political event of some kind?

I mean emergent event as defined by G.H. Mead in Philosophy of the Present, they are discontinuities in history which can either come from finding a new way of approaching and external phenomena or by the arising of new phenomena that we have to come to terms with. Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics that arose early last century are the classic examples of each kind of emergent event. Emergent Events can occur at different scopes like Facticities, Theories, Paradigms (Kuhn), Epistemes (Foucault), Ontos (Heidegger), Existences, or Absolutes. Our tradition is shot through with them. They cause us to rewrite history, reveal new unthought of possibilities, give us new affordances in the present, and demand a new mythos. Also as Dreyfus says that normally something marginal becomes central and something central becomes marginal in these changes so there is not a complete break with the past, but only a quasi-break. It could be in any realm of experience or realm of thought, but I am particularly focused on philosophical or scientific or technological revolutions in my own research.

– If we assume we’re locked into a downward spiral of nihilism (and anomie) in the West – what are the implications for social cohesion?

There is intensification of nihilism and intensification of emergence at a particular  scope until a wider scope emergent event occurs to wipe the slate clean at a given level or scope. See also H. Lawson’s Closure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Lawson).

• Could some form of secular, psychologized Buddhism offer any way out of this oscillation between nihilism and the occasional emergent event

Good Catch, Buddhism because it is nondual and offers a way to make non-nihilistic distinctions is an answer. In fact, any nondual path which is also not monistic offers an escape from this samsara of intensification of nihilism and emergence. See my other posts on Buddhism and existence. Basically Buddhist Emptiness is the dual of Taoist Void and prior to that distinction is a deeper nondual called Manifestation which is a standing beyond existence. See M. Henry The Essence of Manifestation who relies on Meister Eckhart to distinguish manifestation from the Essence of Manifestation, i.e. Sifat from Dhat seen in Sufism. When ever Meister Eckhart wants to ground a point he appeals to X and the heathans by which he means the Sufis in Islam. There are indications of such deeper nonduals also in DzogChen, Huan Yen, and Tien Tai Buddhism

http://www.quora.com/English-language/What-is-the-most-misused-word-in-conversational-English

BEING is the most misused word in the English Language.

This is because it is the one word, often used, but never understood.

What are we saying when we use the word BEING in any of its very fragmented forms ARE, IS, AM, WAS, WERE, BE, BEEN, BECOMING

No one knows. Everyone has their own idea. It is at once the highest concept, higher than God (the supreme being) yet as Heidegger says the most empty.

Some people (E’) try their best not to use the word:

http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/grammar_mechanics/how-to-eliminate-to-be-verbs-in-writing/

http://www.trans4mind.com/personal_development/GeneralSemantics/KensEPrime.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

This word is the most contradictory, paradoxical and absurd in the language.

It is contradictory, because it contradicts  our experience which is full of Change, but Parmenides said there was  only one suitable path, which is the Path of Being and that we must resist the paths of appearance (DOXA), and Non-Being (existence). Zeno followed him by pointing out the paradoxes of change. But we must say that the paradox of thinking things are changeless when they are changing is pretty strange. It is a paradox because it is a doubled contradiction. Flowing of experience in change is an ILLUSION and also that the reality is that things are unchanging. This is contradictory to our experience. It produces transcendentals that are invisible conditions that cannot be shown to exist. Thus there is an existential proof of the falsehood of BEING as some sort of unchanging state. Heraclitus countered by pointing out that things are always changing. But we basically took the way of Being as suggested by Parmenides and thus we erected an edifice of illusion which is central to our worldview, and keeps us deeply entangled in illusion.

Being not only makes us think that things are always identical to themselves over time in their essence, but causes us to ignore difference and its significance. Prime example is Metaphor. But, for instance we live in a muti-racial society but racism is still a black/white divide. Dark skinned emigrants are not stigmatized like American Blacks are, even Black Africans are not stigmatized in the same way. So we cling to a special kind of racism which is “white” verses “black”, and “black” verses “white”, only. For instance we have to distinguish between Hispanic Whites and White Whites on forms for employment, however Arabs are considered white no matter how swarthy they are. This is signified in our culture by the odd sign that there is only white salt and black pepper placed on the table. This is a sign of the either/or kind of dualism at the core of our society that cannot recognize other people from other countries as “colored”. In other words we have our own untouchables, and the touchables of other cultures who come here do not fit our biases and so they are not considered as part of the picture of Black/White racism. This is part of the fantasy of Being which sets up what are suppose to be permanent distinctions which are in fact only socially constructed, individually projected, and socially enforced and merely distort what exists so that we can only see it as black and white like we say about newspaper print. The black minority used to exist on a white background, like on this page, but now the background is multicolored and the sharp artificial nihilistic distinction no longer holds in the same way it did up to the 60s, but our ingrained racist attitudes have not changed See (Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man).

So we can think of Racism as the perfect example of what was projected as a permanent distinction at the core of American society which in the face of change, like the civil rights movement, has not changed except superficially because it is a fundamental part of our identity as Americans both black and white. Even taking a stand against Racism, or ignoring it, still makes it into a monument to our cruelty to each other that is unforgettable, and underlies everything we do, making even the changes that we have made in our society, is still part of the lingering of racism through reverse discrimination, etc. This is what shocked Malcolm X when he went on Hajj. He saw all the colors of humanity with no racism, and he realized that racism in America was an illusion particular to our nation and its history which we cling to even as we swear we are getting rid of it.

Interestingly, Black dialects of English use the Being differently than standard English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English). It might be interesting to look at the way that Being has been shaped in the creole english dialects as a way of understanding the deflection away from Standard English as a statement about the nature of Being as apprehended by the minority against which racism has been directed so long based on its roots in slavery.

It is interesting in this regard that Being has always been caught up in the caste structures of Indo-European societies. The fragmentation of the Gods in Indo-European societies reflects the distinctions between castes, with different gods for each caste. And interestingly the kinds of Being can be seen in the Vedas as the differences between these Gods. Thus the kinds of Being is something that has been part of the Indo-European worldview for a long time. In fact it is an unchanging aspect of the worldview. And another one is the fragmentation of the roots of Being (and having) in Indo-European languages. Being is literally a manufactured and artificial concept made up over many Indo-European roots. So this fragmentation is very specific signature which is isomorphic with the castes and the roots of Being itself as a word. By looking at these various roots then we get a deeper picture of the meaning of Being, and it turns out that Heidegger’s distinction between Sein and Seyn (Being and Beyng) is rather superficial among the distinctions between the roots of Being. (See Primal Ontology and Archaic Existentiality by by the author at http://archonic.net.)

Being is contradictory, because it is counter to our own experience of the world. All movement is contradictory as Zeno shows, and Hegel embraces this contradiction at the heart of movement as the very thing that the dialectic sublimates.

Being is paradoxical, i.e It is both empty and full at the same time. It contains everything, but has no meaning itself.

It is a mixture of fragments of Caste and IE roots into a single encompassing structure that signifies continuity only so that difference can be emphasized. For instance we claim to be one people under God, but we support racism by excluding some from citizenship until we were forced to live up to the ideals of freedom and equality that we said we stood for from the first.

Being is absurd, i.e. It is an artificial concept that we made, but we project it as a priori transcendental which should be unified and total, but Being in terms of word roots and castes is inherently fragmented. It is absurd that the Unity and Totality that is suppose to hold the world together within our worldview, is itself completely uncertain, ambiguous, and to be avoided in good writing.

Thus when we say Being or Becoming, we have no idea what we are talking about mainly because the fragmented roots have lost their meaning. We have truly squandered the roots of Being itself, because we have lost them in a set of discontinuities that we no longer notice nor give any credence to.

Even Heideggers distinction between Sein and Seyn is the most superficial of the distinctions between the roots of Being. What is interesting is that Old English roots make more sense than the High German roots. And even more interesting is that there are myths that align with these distinctions between the roots that we can interpret in ontomythology, i.e. when we read the myths as an ontological manuals for the kinds of Being within our worldview.

So although Being is the highest and most empty word. It is the most contradictory, the most paradoxical, and the most absurd of any of the words. Some think it is better not to use it. But they are getting no traction because we unconsciously use the word Being.

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http://www.quora.com/The-Big-Questions/What-are-the-most-fascinating-known-unknowns

http://topicmarks.com/d/0rGdvKW8paWELD-uTVvs5Kh5i

From the point of view of Philosophy, one of the great known unknowns concerns the nature of Knowledge itself.

Another related known unknown is why the Indo-Europeans developed Being with the qualities of Knowledge, but which is an illusion. And what is the relation between this unique indo-european development and the fact that Indo-Europeans have been a dominate player on the world stage throughout known human history.

Metaphysics is the core of Philosophy and it is made up of Epistemology and Ontology. It is interesting that in the Indo-european languages the most broken roots are those of Being and Having. We can argue that Having is a way of approaching knowledge. We say we “have” knowledge. So the question is whether having knowledge is just as illusory as Being’s perdurance. It could be that the split between Knowledge and Being is a symmetry breaking that does not exist in truth, in reality. The standing of existence is perhaps unified in this respect unlike the standing toward the world of Being/Knowing.

So in essence the greatest known unknown is the standing of knowledge itself. But even if we knew the standing of knowledge itself, then there is the question as to how something could be first an unknown unknown then a known unknown, then a known known. And for that matter what is the relation between known unknowns and unknown knowns. Our question here is about known unknowns. But are there unknown knowns as well. We have a whole discipline that deals with the unconscious which would answer yes. What happens when things are pushed into forgetfulness or even into oblivion, do they actually become unknown unknowns again or are they unknown knowns.

So if we were to list some unknown knowns what phenomena would we include? On the one hand we think we can forget and even lose completely what is known into oblivion, but is this true? Are there not always some trace left. For instance, the example given in another answer of Göbekli Tepe. It was in oblivion for us but now it has come back. We knew it once in our history, and even built it, but we covered it up, and now it is back to haunt us with our own ignorance of our own prehistory and origins. We are in a similar position with the deciphering of the Egyptian Language and the Sumarian Languages, we can no longer count their civilizations as forgotten in the mists of time, but much of it remains, and can now be understood but it has still not been completely incorporated into our own notions of our history which starts in our common consciousness with the Greeks, when they were just one step in a long line of various civilizations that have come and gone and left their mark in us.

But ultimately we must track back to the unknown unknowns that loom all around us, like the multiverse within which we are now thinking our universe must be embedded. It is something that will always probably be pure speculation. But that is our way of dealing with an unknown unknown, we make something up. Or like Dark matter and Dark energy. These are names for we know not what, and may never know. Unknown unknowns when they first arise are seen as discrepancies in our data, then we name it, and then we spend a long time not knowing how to proceed to make them unknown knowns. Unknown knowns are the next stage where we really know what is unknown, for instance in Quantum Theory where we have tons of proof that things work a certain weird way but cannot understand it. But eventually these transition into known unknowns, i.e. things that are well defined gaps in knowledge like for instance P=NP or other conjectures that are not yet proven. People work toward the answers, and everyone knows exactly what remains unknown, and they also will be able to recognize when the problem is solved because it is very well defined. Finally there is known knowns where we solve the conjecture and we know the answer, and then it is just a matter of making it more accessible to others as another piece of knowledge among myriad others. But even then we still do not know what knowledge itself is despite being intimate with it, and also we hardly understand its context which is Life, Consciousness and the Social.

Now since there seems to be a series here by which things come into existence, then it behooves us to attempt to understand it in terms of the emergent event. Lets guess that the kinds of Being are what separate these varioius relations between known and unknown.

Transcendences
Oblivion = Ultra Knowledge = Singularity = Learning^4 = no traces = unknowable
Meta-system
Unknown Unknowns = Wild Knowledge = Lost = Learning^3 = Forgotten
Relflexive Special System
Unknown knowns = Hyper Knowledge = Exploration = learning to learn
Autopoietic Speical Systems
Known unknowns = Process Knowledge = Learning
Dissipative Special System
Known Knowns = Pure Knowledge = integrated into the body of knowledge.
System
knowns = comprehended eventities and facticity concerning states of affairs.
Immanances

This is the basic structure of the Emergent Event expressed in terms of epistemology rather than ontology. It shows how the Special Systems intertwine with the Meta-levels of Knowledge that relate to Bateson’s meta-levels of Learning (Steps to the Ecology of the Mind). Knowledge has perdurance in the sense that once something important is known, try to forget it, it is very difficult. Thus knowledge is the most stable thing in our experience, yet we really do not possess it because we don’t know where it is when we are not expressing it in the appropriate context at right time. We say we have knowledge but where is it? We don’t know where it is when it is not needed. We say in memory, but there is a lot of memory that is not knowledge. Much of memory has to do with memories of sensations. But where is it that the stable pieces of knowledge are kept?

We know that Knowledge is part of an emergent hierarchy which goes something like this:

Suchness
Given
Facticity
Data
Theory
Information
Paradigm
Knowledge ***
Episteme
Wisdom
Ontos
Insight
Existence
Actualization
Absolute

Knowledge is the central element in this hierarchy with regard to the individual which are the levels in Bold, while the interleaved hierarchy is social. Unlike the emergent Hierarchy of the schemas that have a gap in the middle where the special systems appear, in this case the central position is taken by knowledge with its odd mixture of perdurance and lack of whereness. Knowledge is also key to our process of Experience. Following Plato Kant concentrates on Reason, and the role it plays as central, but much that we know from experience is unreasonable. And part of it is the sexual sense of knowing as a euphemism for sexual experience. Knowledge is wider than reason and ultimately more important to our survival even though reason plays a key role.

Now if knowledge plays this key role and its perdurance is unquestioned, then our real question is why there is a detour into Being within the Indo-European tradition. We should not kid ourselves that there is not illusion in cultures that only have existence, that is why we call emptiness and void interpretations of existence. There is dukkah, maya, dunya that covers over existence too, but in our case there is an extra level of illusion that produces delusion especially when mixed with action on the basis of illusion. And in this case two wrongs do not make a right, but it really carries is only further astray.

I am going to speculate that when you have two levels of illusion, basic illusion that covers over existence as interpenetration and advanced illusion that sees perduence in things by postulating a substrata that perdures as things change we get by the layering of illusion (dukkha, maya, mara, dunya) that we get a mirroring effect within illusion itself, Illusion becomes reflexive. Now illusion itself is already very complex and tricky without this reflexive quality, so when we get the mirage of the mirage, so to speak, i.e. raise illusion to a power then we get something very complex, as well as something contradictory to experience where we see that the only thing that does not change is change itself, and paradoxical due to the reflections of contradiction in the reflexivity, and absurdity in which paradoxes reflect each other.

Now if this were true, then we would see that Being is really a mirroring of Existence because Existence is composed of the Special Systems seen as supra-rational, but Being is building up a similar hierarchy within the reflexivity of illusion going from contradiction to paradox (which we know from Spencer-Brown and Hellerstein are twinned and entwined) to Absurdity where paradoxes are twinned and entwined.

So Being is an artificial mimicking of Existence within illusion. That is an interesting result, which if true would have broad implications for our understanding of the Indo-European linguistic project that produced Being as a unique and anomalous linguistic structure.

This reminds us of the myth of Nephele, where Zeus gets wind that someone wants to have an affair with Hera, and so he makes a duplicate copy of Hera called Nephele, whom that character makes advances toward and is then caught and punished. But now there is the problem of two Heras running around the original and the copy. Hera forces some mortal to marry Nephele to get rid of her. But what this story does is it places mirroring as a feminine theme to the extent that there is in the myth self-mirroring (cloning) and all the problems that produces. What you get is the interplay of the copy with the original, and in our case within the Western worldview that gives us Plato’s Divided Line which is basically the interspace between Existence and the doubled illusion of Being. Doubling of illusion does not take us back to existence, but into more and more rarified realms of self-deception.

Getting back to the question, we have seen that the meta-levels of knowledge can be conceived as the interplay between known and unknown reaching out from the unknowable and become an image of the emergent event, i.e. the transition from the unknowable to the known of something new, or something old and lost like an old civilization or a new continent as a frontier for exploration. Emergent events can either be generated internally by looking at the deeper assumptions of our theories, or externally by discovering new phenomena that are recognized as completely new and actually existing even though they go against our whole way of looking at existence (super-conductivity when it was first found for instance). So if we talk about emergent knowledge then we do not need Being at all. But once we focus on ontology and project that it has the perdurence of knowledge, then the focus shifts to emergent eventities (ontic emergence) under the auspices of Being, and Emergence and Nihilism then become a pair of Nihilistic opposites which merely means that they are reflected in the complex mirrors of illusion upon illusion.

Quora: http://www.quora.com/Which-character-was-deemed-as-the-first-existential-crisis-in-literary-history/answer/Kent-Palmer?__snids__=22508750#comment470265

Topicmarks Summary: http://topicmarks.com/d/1BQKs1HrJrtMYKrvrCOE26640

Existential Crisis?

There is no existential crisis per se, but a crisis that occurs when one comes out of Being and realizes that its projections are illusions.

But this situation is muddied by the fact that many of the so called existentialists never make it out of Being and so what is called an existential crisis is a catastrophe within Being.

If you mean realization of anomie or lack of meaning in existence when it is realized that the projections are empty, then the crisis itself is implicit in Being as an illusion, seeing existence where value projections cease has no crisis. You don’t have a crisis when you pick up a rock beside the road and then lose it. You have a crisis when you find gold then lose it. But ultimately gold and the rock beside the road are the same except for our valuing Gold due to its relative rarity.

The better example are diamonds, the only reason they are considered valuable is that there is a monoply artificially maintained that takes the worlds surplus of diamonds and stores them to create an illusory scarcity which then allows what is essentially worthless to have a high price. That and advertising like “Diamonds are forever” seems to work to maintain this illusion of their worth.

The person who realizes that diamonds are worthless and does not invest in them has no crisis. The one who has crisis is the one who buys of lots of diamonds and because he believes the advertising, or because his bride believes it, and then realizes he was gypped because they are actually worth as much as sand, well maybe a little more. Artificial Diamonds are colored and are too perfect and so they are differentiated from so called “Real” diamonds. But we can essentially produce as many diamonds as we want, everyone could have real diamonds rather than paste because diamonds are worth about as much as paste, well perhaps a little more.

The tragedy in all this is of course Blood Diamonds, i.e. a few diamonds that escape from the monopoly due to the arms trade. People actually die because these renegade diamonds are worth quite a bit due to the artificial scarcity created by the monopoly. And of course the whole idea of Blood Diamonds is par of the advertising crusade to keep the Monopoly as tight as possible because these leaks could make people realize that diamonds are worthless. So the advertisers create an artificial difference and blame the drug and arms traders for a situation that need not exist. We don’t talk about blood gold.

Anyway, the fact that diamonds are in reality just like the stones beside the road in their actual value is a real irony. But it points up the way we create illusory values, like printed money for instance, and then these illusory signs of possible exchange that are given value, and then that shapes the constraints on our lives that otherwise would not exist, but also opportunities that would not exist. The constraints and opportunities can be very real to us in spite of the fact that they are founded on illusory distinctions that are instituted in Being but do not really exist.

Comment:

Answer [to who is the first “existential” character] is Achilles who is the first character in our tradition who reacts to nihilism. But there is no existential crisis as such but a crisis with respect to Being.

Comment:

Achilles redeems himself from this accusation[of being a brute]. It is the river that is the “brute” and to which he is contrast. But he redeems himself when his humanity returns after his berzerker rage after then death of Patroclus and in which he killed Hector. He gives Hector’s father the body of his fallen son, and in that we see the fact that Achilles will never see his own father again, as does Odysseus. Understanding the pathos of the situation requires that we go back to the marriage of Thetis his mother, and recognize that only she and Demeter wear the black cloak of greif one for the son and the other for the daughter, and so these two stories are parallel. All the structures of our worldview are exemplified in these epic, structures we have forgotten about, or that have been lost in oblivion. These stories are free of the anxiety of influence because they are the primordial epics of the Indo-European worldview which we only see properly when we compare them carefully with the later and not as deep Mahabharata. But in the Mahabharata we get the whole picture that is missing from the Iliad and Odyssey. We have to go back before the anxiety of influence to the poems that were preserved because they were perfect, but perfect in relation to what, perfect in relation the structure of the indo-european worldview, because they exemplify its structure perfectly. “Existential angst” in most cases merely is a confrontation with the contradiction, paradox, and absurdity of Being itself. It does not reach to the nonduality of existence that is beneath the superstructure of myriad veils of Illusion (Maya) produced by Being (Sat). There is no crisis of Existence only a crisis of Being when the illusion is shattered, but you can only have illusions in contrast with reality and reality is an aspect of Being as well as Existence. But existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect while quintessence is both aspect and anti-aspect. Quintessence is the key, it is the philosophers stone. In Achilles in his realization of the nihilism of the war (i.e. Trojans and Acheans are the Same) then Achilles exemplifies passivity, that then causes his “friend/lover” to be killed, and then he switches over into the Indo-European bezerker rage and becomes like a force of nature, killing indiscriminately, and it is this rage that allows him to overcome Hector. But passivity and the bezerker rage are artificial extreme opposite actions that are the reaction to the realization of the nihilistic situation and the consequent loss of meaning of Achilles. We must remember that Achilles is a tragic character with one weak spot, otherwise he is like a god.

Ah. at last a question we can really go somewhere with. Simple answer is he doesn’t but not because he did not try. And we can learn a lot from his attempts. Best book to define Nihilism is the one by Stanley Rosen. In that book he contrasts Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s philosophies as nihilistic opposites. While you read that book, I will go back and finish the answer to the other question.

. . . [time passes] . . .

http://www.quora.com/How-does-Heidegger-overcome-the-problem-of-nihilism

Now why is this a good question?

This is a good question because it is one of Heidegger’s major concerns, and because Nihilism is the matter that is produced at the heart of the Western worldview. And because Heidegger attempted mightily to overcome nihilism but failed. And from his failure we can learn a lot about ourselves and perhaps even get a glimpse of what we need to do to overcome nihilism ourselves. Books such as that of Stanley Rosen have that shows that Wittgenstein and Heidegger have philosophies that are nihilistic opposites, and thus that is a beginning of an answer to the question because if it is true that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the nihilistic opposite of Heidegger then it cannot be that Heidegger escaped nihilism.

Topicmarks summary: http://topicmarks.com/d/07LnboGt_sXc4avfK77mZ5QCp

So where do we start? Both Heidegger and Nietzsche discuss the inherent nihilism of Western culture. But it is Rosen who makes it clear what Nihilism is, which is when extreme opposite duals are recognized to be the same thing, so that one realizes that being caught up with the struggle between the duals previously is really meaningless. Nihilism is then that which sucks meaning out of our lives creating not just alienation bu also anomie (meaninglessness a term from Durkheim). A good example is how we get caught up in the our politics between Democrats and Republicans, but actually it is incumbents, from either party that rule with sovereignty (they pass laws for the rest of us that do not apply to themselves). The locus classicus of this is in the Iliad where Agamemnon takes Bresius from Achilles, and Achilles realizes that the Achaeans are no different from the Trojans who allowed Paris to steal Hellen. Achilles abjures combat and sulked until his “friend” Patroclus is killed wearing his armour, then Achilles goes into a berzerker rage, thus the reaction to the nihilism of the identity between Trojans and Achaean’s, is nihilistic going from the extremes of passivity to the extreme of Berzerker mode. He does not come out of this extreme state until Hector’s father comes to claim his body, and this reminds Achilles how he will never again see his own father. Achilles himself is given an extreme choice between living in obscurity a long life and living a short life of glory. Basically the Iliad and Odyssey (and the Mahabharata their Indian counterpart) are a lesson on how to live in and cope with the nihilism of our worldview. The ancients recognized the nature of our worldview better than we do.

Ok, so now we know from Rosen’s analysis what Nihilism really is, it is when meaning is sucked out of our existence by realizing that opposites we really believed in and one of which we identified with respect to their struggle are really the same. For instance Fascism and Communism. They are really the same thing even though they are so different. And after the defeat of Fascism then we had the duality between Capitalism and Communism for most of the Twentieth Century, and Baudrillard wrote the book The Mirror of Production to show that they had a similar fundamental assumption: that man was created to produce. Part of nihilism is how enemies come to resemble each other more and more as they struggle against each other. And the strangest thing about Nihilism is the fact that it is the stage setting for Emergence in our culture, i.e. the radical resetting of states of affairs that G.H. Mead describes in the Philosophy of the Future. Emergence and Nihilism are themselves nihilistic opposites, and understanding this duality and its dynamic takes us to the heart of our world view in ways I have described elsewhere.

However, let us return to the question at hand. How did Heidegger try to overcome Nihilism, and why did he fail and to what extent can he be said to have succeeded. We must note that Heidegger studied Nietzsche in great depth during the war because people took Nietzsche as the philosopher who’s works underwrote the Nazi movement. Heidegger wanted that title, and so he studied Nietzsche intensely to try to see how he could overcome Nietzsche’s claim to that title. Heidegger was associated with the Brown Shirts who were for continually revolution under Nazism, and when the coup happened in which the blackshirts assassinated the Brown Shirts then Heidegger lost power and interest within the movement which had foisted him into the limelight as Rector of his University. So the ultimate proof of the nihilism of Heidegger’s philosophy is his association and promotion of Nazism, which due to the holocaust has gained universal condemnation, even though Stalin actually killed more people than Hitler. But it is the fact that he constructed a Death Machine of the concentration camps that was uncovered and shocked the world upon liberation that Fascism is seen as worse than Communism in this respect. At any rate it is pretty amazing that the United States and its Allies managed to defeat both of these extreme opposite ideologies in of the Twentieth Century. One had the greatest army in the world, and the other had the most dedicated and single minded soldiers in the world, and the US managed to beat both of them mostly due to the vast resources of that we had in America. But the whole effort of defeating these two ideological foes completely transformed our country in myriad ways during the last century. Especially it is the way we dominated by the use of technology in warfare that is surprising. And to a certain sense brings us back to Heidegger’s point that all the combatants are being overcome more by technology than we are being overcome by each other by engaging in the struggle. The example of the Abomb is classic, we developed it because we thought the Nazi’s were developing it but then we used it on the Japanese instead due to the fact that we thought that they would fight to the end when we tried to take the Japanese mainland and we were losing about ten thousand men at a time due to the sinking of our troop ships with Kamikaze pilots. Thus began the Japanese fated encounter with Radiation, which has now tragically repeated itself due to the recent Tsunami. The fire bombing of Dresdan and other European cities was equally horrific but those were normal horrors we have grown used to in war. The dropping of the atomic bomb was an extraordinary episode that became the hallmark for the Cold War, because we knew what could happen if World War III ever broke out. The fact that we faced ultimate annihilation of each other each day during the Cold War is the ultimate face of the nihilism of the last century that came from this struggle to the death between ideologies and through that struggle with extreme opposite Ideologies solidified the ideology of capitalism that we see Deleuze and Guattari discussing in Anti-Oedipus. For them Capitalism is the last all engulfing stage of Ideology and its effect is the production of Schizophrenia. This in itself is an extreme and nihilistic statement but it is just one more example of how nihilistic opposites interact with each other such that Capitalist Ideology and Schizophrenia are seen to share some common attributes.

Now lets go into the attempts of Heidegger to overcome the Nihilism posited by Nietzsche in Will to Power as the ultimate core of the Western worldview. Heidegger interprets Will to Power as Will to Will. Will to Power is the fundamental impulse for the stronger to overcome the weaker, and to take charge of affairs in the world. What Nazism and Communism shared was their Will to Power. We can call this the “We will bury you” attitude that calls for hitting of shoes on podiums. Hitler merely said we will conquer you. But both lost out more due to their own internal weakness than anything we did, but still we repelled the enemy, and they recognized ultimately that we were a power to deal with, that we had our own Will to Power based in Democracy and the Concept of radical Freedom of the individualism that underwrites the power of the market within Capitalism. Our foes consider us weak, because our our hubris or our seeming decadence, but each has discovered that we are good rivals and that swearing allegiance to the constitution is a powerful incentive which ultimately is greater than swearing allegiance to any one tyrant. There have only been about five original democratic movements in the world, and the American Revolution was one of them, along with Athens and the Republic of Rome, and the Magna Carta. These civilizations founded on Democracies, but which eventually deteriorated back into Sovereignty after the initial flourishing. However, it is interesting how these rare political experiments had a such a disproportionate effect on history, or at least the history we are interested in, i.e. the history of Europe and the Middle East.

Heidegger placed himself at the center of this political Maelstrom of competing ideologies in the twentieth century, and chose the wrong side, from our rear view mirror look at history as the winners of that world wide conflict. But since the Nazism became seen as intellectually and morally bankrupt. Heidegger could not help but getting stained by this willing association. And the fact that he wanted to be recognized as THE philosopher of the Third Reich makes this all the worse for his reputation. And even though Heidegger’s supporters would like to forget this association, I think that he was actually the Philosopher of that Movement even though he was not recognized as such, because it is clear that Nietzsche’s philosophy was antithetical to Fascism and the association that was made between his philosophy and Nazism did an injustice to Nietzsche’s Philosophy.
Few I think are going to argue, that it is this association with Nazism and Fascism that did not stain the reputation of Heidegger, and the fact that he wanted to be the philosopher of the movement shows a certain bankruptcy. And part of that is the fact that he did not help Husserl, his teacher, who was born a Jew but converted to Christianity, and eventually ran afoul of the Nazi regime. All of these are damning criticisms. But it tells us something deep about our worldview that the greatest philosophy of the last century was inherently fascist. That contrasts strongly with the inherent superficiality of all the dogmatic attempts at Soviet philosophy. Dialectical Materialism ultimately became difficult to distinguish from religious dogma and eventually had only the substance of pure repetition. So it is ironic that Zizek sees himself as a Communist Philosopher, who when asked about the fall of Soviet Communism said “If you first do not succeed try try again.” It is ludicrous, and probably is a wry joke on his part. By fighting the Fascists America absorbed some of the essential features of fascism, like McCarthyism, the Black List, and the interment of Japanese Americans. By fighting the Communists America made a compromise with its unions in order to make sure that Communism could not gain a foothold here. It instituted collective bargaining and that produced a well to do working class less susceptible to communist ideology. Now that this threat is no longer on the horizons those union rights are now targeted to be rolled back, especially sense all the jobs have been shipped overseas by the multinational corporations. America today as the sole dominate player on the world stage and our empire (the proof of which are our bases throughout the world) has been directly shaped by the ideological battles fought and won in the last century.

An example of Capitalist Ideology is the idea that Markets are self-governing so we do not need any regulation, which led to the financial meltdown. An ideology is a single idea taken to an extreme that becomes the unifying factor for the whole set of ideas, they are fantasies like the communist fantasy of all working people being united in the pledge “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”. Unfortunately the crack in that system was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat which never faded away. With regard to Fascism it is the cult of the Volk (folk) that as a race has a manifest destiny to rule the world. This idea of the mystic union of a people with their Fatherland personified by the Fuhrer, was a central idea in Heideggarian romanticism. Equally it is a fantasy that the invisible hand will take care of everything in the market and we don’t have to have any checks and balances to avoid fraud. Ideology is where one unifying idea taken to extreme is used to organize all other ideas around it. For Heidegger this one idea is Being. For Foucault it was Power. But as Dreyfus points out the structure of Foucault’s theory is precisely the same as that of Heidegger if we just substitute Power for Being. And we can read that in the other direction, because Being can be taken as the ultimate ideology of the Indo-Europeans which Heidegger was taping into. It is a construct made of many fragments of the roots of other words, and so Being and Having are unique in their fragmentation within Indo-European languages and also have a unique meaning. For us what is taken to an extreme and becomes an ideology is the very idea of Being and Heidegger wanted to appropriate this to underwrite fascism as the basic ideology of the Indo-European Volk. One aspect of Fascism was reconnecting with the German Indo-European roots, which is a romantic idea.

Now for Heidegger overcoming the subject/object duality was his initial answer to nihilism that was apparent in Husserl’s phenomenology as an extension of Kantian Idealism. That Idealism had split from Materialism as Marx turned Hegel upside down we saw the split between Fascism which was basically romantic taking after Hegel through the critique of Nietzsche, splitting off from the Early Christian communal practices derived from the Jews and revived by the Antibaptists as well as Greek ideals of Communism that we see in Aristophanes and Plato. Thus the Semitic heritage on the one hand and the Greek equivalent of science fiction put on stage as comedies, were splitting from Indo-European strata discovered by a couple of centuries of Philology. It is interesting that Communism appears in Aristophanes as a joke and in Plato as his picture of Hell in the Republic. It is also interesting that if flourished also independently as part of Christianity several times. But German romanticism was wanting to split off from Christianity and return to the old Indo-European gods, to gods that were vital and did not instill a slave mentality. Communism wanted to take Aristophanes and Plato seriously and produce a “workers heaven” in which the state takes care of everyone, not realizing that by making the state the only employer and owner that this was really just an extreme form of Capitalism, as we see in Communist China today.

Heidegger thought that it was precisely the duality of subject and object that was the problem, and if we got to what was before that then we would uncover the primal strata that connected each of us to the ultimate ideological source which is Being, the purist Indo-European ideology. What Heidegger did not realize was that he was opening up Pandora’s box, and that instead of undermining nihilism he was in the process of intensifying it. It was when Heidegger discovered Being Crossed Out (Hyper Being, Differance) that he became genuinely afraid because he thought he had opened up an infinite regress of kinds of Being. As it turns out this is not true in practice even though it seems like it might be possible in theory. In practice there are only five meta-levels of Being (about the same number of levels as we can go in our meta-Theory-of-Mind ruminations). Heidegger realized that if there were infinite meta-levels of Being that this would be just as nihilistic as Being was as a homogeneous plenum, it in fact is the nihilistic dual of the traditional view of Being.

So Heidegger studied Nietzsche very carefully, and realized that there was an alternative to this which would allow us to get rid of the fundamental distinction of ontological difference between Being and beings. That would be possible if he posited a nonstriated counterpart to striated Being (Sein) which he called Beyng (Seyn). This is the old high German spelling used by Hegel, and if we distinguished Being from Beyng, its dual, and if we interpreted Hegel in those terms then we could see him talking about Beyng and Dasein (Spirit/Ghost/Mind). In Being and Time at a certain point Heidegger identifies Dasein with Geist the romantic ideal of the holy ghost, or the community spirit, which is still there when the leader has gone. This can be seen in the recently translated Contributions to Philosophy (from Ereignis) and in Mindfulness. This is an amazing book which turns Heideggarian scholarship upside down because it is another major book from Heidegger just as fundamental as Being and Time, and under which the interpretation of all of Heidegger changes, because it is a text he kept hidden, but which determined all of his late work. Now we are not going to be able to delve deeply into this very fascinating work here. But we can bring it to bear on the question at hand because it is the second great attempt of Heidegger to solve the problem of Nihilism seen as the theoretically possible infinite regress of kinds of Being. Beyng stands opposite the meta-levels of striated Being as Onefold, Strange, and Unique. While Being is lost in forgetfulness Beyng is lost in oblivion, while Being is receding from us Beyng is bearing down on us and enveloping us before we know it. Beyng is found when we jump over Ontological Difference without making that distinction that generates the kinds of Being.

For me Beyng can be seen as a solution to the age old problem of Meaning. It is a separate orthogonal source of meaning which is freed from its dependence on syntax. Thus I view the concept of Beyng as the dual of Being as a real breakthrough, and it is born out in my study of the Indo-European roots of Being. A new key word is found Ereignis which describes the happening (appropriation) of Beyng, and Dasein has a relation to Beyng as it does to Being but completely different. We might contrast this difference as that between the Last Man and the Umber Man in Nietzsche. Those who know Beyng are yet to come. The age of Metaphysics is the passing of the gods and we are awaiting the passing of the last god for the new era to dawn. Heidegger sees himself as the herald of the new post-metaphysical era, and Nietzsche as the last great metaphysician. By recognizing Beyng Heidegger thinks he has escaped the unfolding of the epochs of Being. But unfortunately this is not true because Being/Beyng has a dual which is Forgetfulness/Oblivion. This is just a deeper level of showing and hiding, presence and absence, identity and difference, truth and fiction, reality and illusion. Beyng is related to the quintessence which is both aspect and anti-aspect just as existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect. In Being the aspects are separated but in Beyng they are fused. The quintessence of Beyng is like the Philosophers Stone, the ultimate catalyst that transforms everything. It is a possibility in the worldview even if it does not exist. In fact quintessence and existence are mutually exclusive. Quintessence is always virtual. We see it operating in many alchemical texts with their upside down theologies of the earth. Unfortunately giving the quintessence a separate kind of standing called Beyng does not solve the problem of nihilism but only really makes it worse because there is something like Teilhard Chardin’s Noosphere that is invisible but needs to be explained and grounded in philosophical speculation as well as in the tradition. This is not easy. And it is the opposite problem from the kinds of Being. For them we must explain how it can be that the kinds of Being are separated from each other. With Beyng we must explain why everything is collapsed together and fused like a Bose-Einstein condensate. Both are hard to explain, but necessary to understand the full implications of Being itself. Being has this nihilism within it and is not just a homogeneous plenum which is highest but most empty of concepts. It has structure and meaning but they are extreme difference and extreme identity, they are extreme illusion and extreme reality, they are extreme fiction and extreme truth, they are extreme absence and extreme presence all together at the same time in this strange, unique onefold.

So while ereignis of Dasein is suppose to offset its separation into existeniels, it merely produces an antimony to Being which helps elucidates its meaning but does not cast out the demon of nihilism that plagues us due to our denial of existence.

Essentially Beyng/Oblivion/Unstriated and Being/Forgetfulness/Striated are the deeper nihilistic opposites we need to worry about now, not merely those produced by the meta-levels of Being. I call this field of striated and unstriated opposites the Pleroma. The fact that Heidegger got down to the level of the Pleroma in his thought is quite amazing. It is the ultimate infrastructure or substrate of the worldview, the field out of which our Indo-European worldview arises. The Pleroma (Fullness) had a similar position in Gnostic thought, so by analogy I used this term, because there is no specific term for this level in metaphysics, but I do not mean by the term what the Gnostics meant. There is a certain sense in which the Taoist void appears full as the source from out of which everything comes, I mean it in that sense. It is something more fundamental that Fundamental Ontology, and that is what Heidegger meant all along in his later work, but which we only discover later as his unpublished works come to light. It was thought prior to the publication of Contributions to Philosophy that Heideggers ideas were somewhat quirky in his later period. But in the context of the well developed work Contributions it becomes clear that his thought was actually deeper than we realized, and it is us who need to catch up once again, as he again redefines the boundaries of Metaphysics. One thing to note is that Beyng is not the ONE. It is onefold like a knot or something intricately folded so it has a unique structure in spite of being continuous with itself, it embraces differences with itself, being Unique and Strange to us. It is a visitor from afar who is a stranger who bears down upon us to envelop us from a unique perspective that lies outside of Being, but is implicated in Being from the beginning. By taking the perspective of Beyng we are moving toward understand the other beginning than the one which metaphysics represents. We might say that this is a beginning in Repetition, in the sense that Deleuze uses the term to mean its opposite, i.e. that which cannot be repeated, the kind of repetition explored by Kierkegaard and Freud that Zizek things is their great achievement which is a way that they are similar to each other.

If we go back to Parmenides he describes three ways, Being, Non-Being (Existence) and Appearance. Seyn would be the way that these three proto-existentiels are the same Being despite being radically different. Being is in speech and thus related to talk which is for the most part chatter. Non-Being is related to Discoveredness (Befindlichkeit) because Existence is what is found, and what is found is normally boring to us, unless we project value on it. Appearance is related to understanding. Understanding is the combination of Reason and Experience in which they mutually support each other. Kant valorized Experience and warned about Reason being used independently because it leads to antimonies that cannot be resolved. However, this was a reaction against the valorization of Reason over Appearances/Opinions (Doxa) that was the previous imbalance in Western Philosophy promoted by Plato. So Understanding is the combination of our reasoning capability and what appears to us to be the case as a state of affairs in our experience. Understanding is the noesis that is connected to the noema of pure appearance in Husserl’s terms. Thus the three existentiels of Heidegger were there from the beginning in Parmenides routes. Parmenides selected just one way, that of Being (Sein) as the proper way, suppressing existence as Non-Being and Appearance/Opinion (Doxa). But in a way all of these are faces of Being as it is projected by us as Dasein. Dasein is the term for Existence and Ecstasy in German Philosophy, and note that they still think of it as a kind of Being that is there, i.e. imbued with reference. Even the Arabs realized that what they called Wajud was a part of what was meant by Being in Greek. So Non-Being is implied in Being as a substrate of otherness within itself. When you separate Being from Non-Being as Existence then what is left over is the Doxa (appearance/opinion) which is made Present, questioned as to its reality and truth, and which attempts to remain identical with itself through time in a monotonic way. So we note that all the ways of Parmenides that are related to the Existentiels of Heidegger are all parts of Being, but Parmenides attempts to restrict Being to Pure Presence, Pure Identity, Pure Truth, and Pure Reality, and eschews Absence, Difference, Fiction, and Illusion which are thrust into the nether world of existence, and appear to us in doxa because they resist a complete ban which would split Being. Heraclitus on the other hand champions Existence as the Fire of Change. But Seyn was there from the beginning as the strange, unique, onefold of all three ways that together comprise the split between Being and Existence and its result.

Notice that we have the difference between Being (talk=rede, language, unique linguistic feature), Anti-Being (appearance, opinion; Understanding=verstehen, Doxa differing from Ratio), and Non-Being (existence; discoveredness=befindlichkeit). This suggests the Greimas Square. And that square suggests that there is a combination of Non-X and Anti-X so we get the chiasm of Anti-non-X and Non-Anti-X. This kind of Chiasma (reversibility) is indicative of Wild Being but also non-duality because it is like a relativistic interval. Basically the difference between Existence and Pure Being (static, Parmedean, Initiation into the Greater Mysteries), is the difference between the Meta-system and the System. Heraclitian Flux is the same as Process Being (flux and flow, initiation into the lesser mysteries). Process Being is like the flux of continual change we see in existence, the principle of change that Parmenides denies and Zeno turns into Contradictions and Paradoxes. When we distinguish Process Being from Hyper Being (Plato’s third kind of Being), then we are beginning to see the difference between Process Being and Appearance/Opinion (Doxa) what is Doxa but a slippery mercurial residue or supplement to Being in both its major modalities (Stasis and Flow). When we go beyond Anti-Being the only way to do that is to combine the Anti-non-X and the Non-anti-X in a reversible chiasm of the type that is seen by Merleau-Ponty to be the hallmark of Wild Being, but which is also a movement toward non-duality, which we discover when we arrive at Existence having traveled though the other kinds of Being. It turns out that the Special systems are interleaved with the Meta-levels of Being and thus are part of the tacit knowledge and implicate order of Being itself. The hallmark of Existence is that it is interleaved and intertwined with Being. The nondual and the Duality between Monism/Dualism can be seen unfolding in this display of the emergence of Being itself. Being is not One, but is fragmented, both in terms of meta-levels, roots and Peircian Principles as well as by the special systems. But Pure Being attempts to produce the illusion of Oneness. (“One People, One Nation, One Leader”, as the Fuhrer wanted everyone to profess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer). But this striation that runs through Being is complemented by the unstriated appropriation of the dehiscence by Seyn, or Beyng. For Parmenides there is indecision as to what Heraclitian fire might be, either existence or mere appearances. For Heraclitus there is indecision as to what Static Being might be either mere illusions of stasis in a changing world, or Phenomenological appearances in which Husserl would see the things themselves without the bracketed assumptions that we project on them.

Essentially Seyn and Sein were intertwined from their origin and represented two different beginnings the Metaphysical one and the post-Metaphysical one. But unfortunately post-Metaphysical still contains the idea of Metaphysics merely transformed into its antimony. And it is because Sein and Seyn are antimonies that Heidegger failed to find an answer to Nihilism, and that is because he did not push all the way to nonduality, despite rumors of Asian influence on his thought (Parkes).

Now if one takes the point that Heidegger failed to overcome nihilism, and he is one of the latest of the greatest philosophers in our tradition, up there with Kant, Hegel, Husserl, but perhaps not reaching the level of Aristotle or Plato, then what is the hope of us ever solving this problem within our tradition?

This is a problem that I have attempted to address in my own work. If we can get past the duality of Analytical Philosophy and Continental (Synthetic) Philosophy, then perhaps we can see the real quandary we are in which is that we do not understand our own worldview and its structure that produces nihilism, but also emergence as well as nihilistic duals of each other. Nihilism is the artificially too dark background on which the too light emergent event (novum) can be seen and recognized. Without the continual production of Nihilism there would be no way to see Emergence when it occurs. The intertwining of emergence and nihilism gives us additional clues to the nature of the problem we face. In my own research I tried to understand Continental Philosophies “Kinds of Being” based on the Theory of Higher Logical Types (cf Russell via Copi), as the precondition for emergence within our tradition at all the various scopes: fact, theory, paradigm (Kuhn), episteme (Foucault), ontos (Heidegger), existence (Hegel’s Buddhist version of Nothing), absolutes (Kant’s transcendental framework of Subject/Object and God). I did this work for my first Ph.D. and thought I was done. But then in the midst of a career in Software and Systems Engineering, I continued my studies especially of myth, via Dumazil, and eventually discovered that in the oldest book we have, the Vedas, the difference between the castes of the Gods are precisely the same in their nature as the Kinds of Being discovered as meta-levels by Continental Philosophy. So suddenly it is not just a contemporary aberration, but a very very persistent structure so I came out of Academic retirement and wrote my first very long book called The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void, in which I study ontomythology of the Western worldview, i.e. the fact that when you look at Myth via the meta-levels of Being that it clarifies the meaning of myth. Greek Myth is a users manual for living in a worldview such as ours which generates nihilism which allows us to recognize Emergent events, in which transcendentals become immanent and immanences become transcendental within a new framework after the emergent event. This was just the first of quite a few long books where I explored the ramifications of this idea concerning the intertwining of Being and Existence within our tradition.

From all this research into the Western Tradition, plus various nondual traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, etc it became clear that the way to avoid nihilism was to make nondual non-nihilistic and therefore non-emergent distinctions. Deleuze refers to this as quasi-Causality, which is the kind of causality that occurs in what I call the Emergent Meta-system which has the dynamic of Leibniz’s monads. The Emergent Meta-system is composed of a normal emergent system conjuncted with the three Special Systems. The Special Systems are a model of Existence which is interleaved with the Kinds of Being. By making this distinction between nondual interpenetrating existence and the fragmented kinds of Being that have a unique, onefold and strange constellation only in Indo-European languages, then we can have at least some hints how go go beyond dualism to make nondual distinctions within Buddhist emptiness or the Taoist void, i.e. at the center of the cyclone of the Oblivion of Beyng and the Forgetfulness of Being at the level of the Pleroma, i.e. the structural field out of which the worldview arises. And the most amazing thing I discovered along the way is that the Western Worldview in spite of being Dualistic outwardly, has a nondual core which is unexplored. And thus we can take the homeward path into that nondual core rather than having to appeal to foreign ideas from various nondual traditions imported like exotic spices (in the form of ideas) from the former colonies. As Jung said, our worldview will not be deeply affected by something foreign to it. What we need is a Homeopathic solution, which is the only way to heal the miasma of nihilism that overwhelms us within our tradition.

We have seen that Seyn has been part of Being from the beginning of our Indo-European tradition as the peculiar pattern of discontinuities, i.e. emergences of the kinds of Being that are differences that make a difference (Bateson) within our tradition. Plato recognized at least three of these emergent levels, Pure Being, Process Being (becoming), and Hyper Being which appears in the Timaeus. So it is hard to deny that this knowledge was not part of our tradition at one time, but it seems it was forgotten only to be rediscovered by Heidegger (and Deleuze, with the connection to the Timaeus shown by Sallis in his book on the Chora). Seyn is not just the signature of discontinuities within Being, but also the haunting of Being by itself beyond its Univocality (cf Deleuze). But the haunting of Being by its lost oneness due to its fragmentation is merely the dual of Being itself, its sinister side that is embodied in the singularity at the level of existence of Ultra Being.