Freedom In History

[Pythagorean]

I believe that freedom for man consists in a particular type of triumph and victory. It consists of the expressions of individual mastery in the midst of chaos, tragedy and brutality. Freedom is a sort of purified assertion of the will of a people or a person within a world rife with chaos and brutality. To say that freedom is survival is only partly correct because true freedom is mastery that has already met its challenges.


People who are free or have been free in the past are known by their names: Greeks, Persian, Florentines and also Americans, Germans, Japanese etc. all of the renowned groups have triumphed over great difficulties and become famous within our history books. History is silent however upon the majority of mankind who lived anonymously and briefly, and who left behind no enduring legacy or cultural achievement. The successful races of people are known and the failures are obscured. Those races who have achieved have gained their measure of freedom and success beyond mere survival; their spirits have soared in the world. Sucess and triumph transcends time and is recognizable because it is particular and unified. It is unified and particular because through the human will it has overcome chaos and formlessness. Free people have beaten the odds!

The Greeks found purpose in nature whereas the modern Europeans found purpose in history. The Greeks revered nature and saw history as mundane. The Europeans did not revere the natural world as did the Greeks; the ancient Greeks, in my opinion, were more primitive and backward in this regard than were the Europeans from the 18th Century to the middle of the 20th Century.

The Europeans used history as a guide for humans to achieve freedom in the world. History was, for them, a better guide toward self-perfection and freedom than was nature. For the Europeans nature was lower and nature was also something to be made use of and not worshiped.



The Greeks who lived in nature would not understand the philosophy of history which is a philosophy which states that there is meaning for man within history itself. There was no purpose in history for the Greeks; history for them was not considered to be progressive in nature. The Greeks knew no philosophy of history.

The type of greatness that Plato the Greek espoused was aristocratic rationalism, an endless discourse upon the purpose of man and nature. Whereas the type of greatness that some modern European philosophies of freedom espoused did not involve nature. For them man was free even from nature, man was to pursue his authenticity using his own psychological powers without any hinderance from within nature. Modern man was radically free to create himself within a cosmos that was lower and more mundane. Man was to erect his psychological masterpiece, which was the creation of himself as a unified and free individual, upon the stage of history.

For the Greeks the power to move the world dwelled in natural forces. Whereas for Nietzsche, for example, the power to move the world lay in man's psychological force called the will to power. Some may argue that the will to power is tantamount to the superstitions of the Greeks with their nature worship and their gods. And I would agree to the extent that Nietzsche's psychological will powers point to an explosive transmutable psychological 'substance' or bio-chemical element that is empirical and 'this' worldly although not fully known and therefore mysterious to us. But if Nietzsche and the moderns are correct then through the achievement of freedom and authenticity through the will to power the true individual will be actually capable of controlling the machinery of world-history. Because the authentically free man is so profound as to literally move the world.

True freedom may just lie in this mystery of psychological profundity and the authentic powers of the will as the will of man conquers nature and forces himself upon world-history as a particular set of psychological states and power-moves.

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[Ron C. de Weijze]

Triumph of Will World in Motion

[Pythagorean]

No, I don’t think Obama is a fascist. In fact, of all the politicians out there, he gives me more hope that we can chart a path to solve immense problems facing our country.

I guess it depends upon whose will we're talking about?

I'm not trying to get political. I'm writing philosophy of history and psychology as I see and enjoy it.

And Nietzsche was not a Nazi. But don't worry it is a very common mistake. The rule of society by psychologists and philosophers is very far away from Hitler and Obama.

[Fido]

Freedom flows out of a community... Freedom outside of a community is outlawry...

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Pythagorean

I guess it depends upon whose will we're talking about?

I'm not trying to get political. I'm writing philosophy of history and psychology as I see and enjoy it.

And Nietzsche was not a Nazi. But don't worry it is a very common mistake. The rule of society by psychologists and philosophers is very far away from Hitler and Obama.

You are correct; Nietzsche was not a nazi... The nazis were Neitzchean... In gross... They took him as they took science, only as much as they thought they could use...

[avatar6v7]

What is meant by 'freedom' from nature? It is natural to breath and live and reproduce; do you suggest we emancipate ourselves from these things? And what is your rather unclear comparison between 'greek' and later 'european' philosophies as regards freedom and nature? Greece is the birthplace of democracy, and freedom from nature is simply the destruction of our selves.

[Pythagorean]

Hi.

avatar6v7,

I was taught, and I believe, that the modern conquest of nature through the means of scientific knowledge and technology reoriented European thought. And I don't know if there is any academic dispute over this fact. If there is dispute I haven't heard of it.

And the Greeks on the other hand are considered as the most natural people in history. Their religion is that of nature deities, nature gods. For the Greeks, I think, the highest man can reach is contemplation over the nature of things. Whereas for modern man the highest thing is to improve his condition.

Now, I understand that these are complex matters and I realize that my brief outline is superficial. But to answer your question regarding nature I would only go so far.

I would only venture further to say to you that if everything is nature as you suggest, then, strictly speaking, nothing would be nature. Because everything being homogenous there is no point for us to assert specific identities. So there are things which are less natural that some other things, such as man made objects and possibly man's existential condition within technological mass society.

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[Egnirf]

Originally Posted by Pythagorean

For the Greeks the power to move the world dwelled in natural forces. Whereas for Nietzsche, for example, the power to move the world lay in man's psychological force called the will to power. Some may argue that the will to power is tantamount to the superstitions of the Greeks with their nature worship and their gods. And I would agree to the extent that Nietzsche's psychological will powers point to an explosive transmutable psychological 'substance' or bio-chemical element that is empirical and 'this' worldly although not fully known and therefore mysterious to us. But if Nietzsche and the moderns are correct then through the achievement of freedom and authenticity through the will to power the true individual will be actually capable of controlling the machinery of world-history. Because the authentically free man is so profound as to literally move the world.

I underlined the part of this that stood out to me the most. Can you please go into more detail as to what you mean by this?

[Pythagorean]

Hi,

It is the human will. From Fichte, for example, we can understand that the human will is the primal force of human freedom. And we can learn from Schopenhauer that the will is the primal source of the representations that appear to us.

To replace God with the deepest element in man which acts upon a this-worldly basis. Kant says that it is the human mind that makes the world of appearance. Step further into the atheist philosophy to use our profoundest determinations to move 'history', to move the world - - it is harsh and it is quite war-like as Nietzsche says. Another way it has been put is that it is the immanentization of the eschaton (see for example Eric Voegelin). The apocalypse as a form of being-in-the-world. But substitue the immanent advent of God with the will to power.

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[Pythagorean]

I have found the section in Nietzsche where he addresses the problems that are being discussed in this thread. I will post it here. It is from his book titled "Beyond Good And Evil - Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future","The Free Spirit", section 36:

If we assume that nothing is “given” as real other than our world of desires and passions and that we cannot access from above or below any “reality” other than the direct reality of our drives—for thinking is only a relationship of these drives to each other—: are we not allowed to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given is not a sufficient basis also for understanding the so-called mechanical (or “material”) world on the basis of things like this given. I don’t mean to understand it as an illusion, an “appearance,” an “idea” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer*), but as having the same degree of reality as our affects themselves have—as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which everything is still combined in a powerful unity, something which then branches off and develops in the organic process (also, as is reasonable, gets softer and weaker—), as a form of instinctual life in which the collective organic functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, and metabolism, are still synthetically bound up with one another—as an early form of life? In the end making this attempt is not only permitted but is also demanded by the conscience of the method. Not to assume various forms of causality as long as the attempt to manage with a single one has been pushed to its furthest limit (—all the way to nonsense, if I may say so): that is one moral of the method which people nowadays may not evade; —as a mathematician would say, it is a consequence “of its definition.” In the end the question is whether we acknowledge the will as something really efficient, whether we believe in the causal properties of the will. If we do—and basically our faith in this is simply our faith in causality itself—then we must make the attempt to set up hypothetically the causality of the will as the single causality. Of course, “will” can work only on “will”—and not on “stuff” (not, for example, on “nerves”—). Briefly put, we must venture the hypothesis whether in general, wherever we recognize “effects,” will is not working on will—and whether every mechanical event, to the extent that a force is active in it, is not force of will, an effect of the will.—Suppose finally that we were to succeed in explaining our entire instinctual life as a development and branching off of a single fundamental form of the will—that is, of the will to power, as my principle asserts—and suppose we could trace back all organic functions to this will to power and also locate in it the solution to the problem of reproduction and nourishment—that is one problem—then in so doing we would have earned the right to designate all efficient force unambiguously as will to power. Seen from inside, the world defined and described according to its “intelligible character” would be simply “will to power” and nothing else.—

I hope this helps.

-- Pyth