A friend claims witnessing the fall of the first snowflakes.
photos from last winter, I call them, out stealing horses.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Friday, October 24, 2008
Amazon comment on book quoted in last entry
It's a bit old.
But still very interesting.
Oh how I love to read between the lines....
15 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
The Truth Hurts, September 8, 2005
By M. Maguire (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
I recently lost my old battered paperback copy of Weininger's "Sex and Character", and to say I was upset is an understatement. So I was delighted to be able to purchase this new version from Amazon, which in hardback form should last a lot longer than my old one. Which is good because this work of philosophy is simply the most important and enlightening material I have ever read and I want it to go with me to my grave. However I do wish that when modern publishers reprint this book that they would refrain from adding their worthless and prejudiced "tuppence worth" in the form of introductions, book-sleeve descriptions etc. They should simply publish Weininger's famous work in its original form without adding anything to it, as they are not qualified to judge the great Man. As Otto clearly mentions in his treatise, instead of rebutting his logical assertions as to the nature of womankind with equally logically derived and intelligent debate, women and the defenders of women (feminine males) simply slander him with the label Misogynist and Anti-semite (even though He was of Jewish origin himself and was therefore better placed than most to understand the mind of the Jew) etc etc, which has the desired effect of immediately stifling any intelligent analysis of his work. It seems people never change. 100 years after his death and what he predicted has come true. Western Society has sunk ever deeper and deeper into a feminine age. Western Society IS feminine: Absolutely material, devoid of a Soul, of any morality or ethics or religiousness. This is NOT because women have become stronger. As Otto clearly shows they are incapable of ever becoming anything other than they are by nature. It is that men have become weaker, less conscious, ie more feminine. Men have descended, thus giving the appearance that women have ascended. Thankyou so much Otto for your invaluable insights that have helped me to understand the nature of Man and especially woman. I suspect that when you wrote your work 100 years ago you knew it could only ever be understood and appreciated by the few rare Men of the World, of which you were one, and you wrote it for them. I owe you a debt of gratitude.
Men (you know who you are), I suggest you get a copy of Otto's timeless work now, before it disappears forever. I am still amazed that it is even available in this backward age of ours.
___________________________________________
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Letting go of Otto, July 21, 2006
By M. Maguire (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
I read Otto's Sex and Character years ago and for a long long time agreed with its conclusions about the nature of women wholeheartedly. However I would now like to say that my whole previous belief system that I held for many years about the nature of women, a belief that was confirmed and reinforced by Otto's work, is something that I now have serious doubts about. I now believe I was in a state of delusion all those years, and that all those thoughts, attitudes and assumptions that I held about the nature of women were completely false. Reading this book was not a search for knowledge, but a search for confirmation of my pre-existing misconceptions, from a male mind that could have been even more deluded about the nature of women than my own. Far from enlightening me it only sank me deeper into delusion. I can no longer trust a word or a single conclusion in this book. Actually I'm glad, as my whole attitude toward Women has now done an about turn and is a lot more healthy. I no longer believe Women are "soul-less" as Otto claims, but are spiritually equal to men in every way. Sorry sisters, for my previous delusional and harmful ideas about you. I recently threw this book away, it offers nothing positive, healthy or constructive for the mind.
But still very interesting.
Oh how I love to read between the lines....
15 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
The Truth Hurts, September 8, 2005
By M. Maguire (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
I recently lost my old battered paperback copy of Weininger's "Sex and Character", and to say I was upset is an understatement. So I was delighted to be able to purchase this new version from Amazon, which in hardback form should last a lot longer than my old one. Which is good because this work of philosophy is simply the most important and enlightening material I have ever read and I want it to go with me to my grave. However I do wish that when modern publishers reprint this book that they would refrain from adding their worthless and prejudiced "tuppence worth" in the form of introductions, book-sleeve descriptions etc. They should simply publish Weininger's famous work in its original form without adding anything to it, as they are not qualified to judge the great Man. As Otto clearly mentions in his treatise, instead of rebutting his logical assertions as to the nature of womankind with equally logically derived and intelligent debate, women and the defenders of women (feminine males) simply slander him with the label Misogynist and Anti-semite (even though He was of Jewish origin himself and was therefore better placed than most to understand the mind of the Jew) etc etc, which has the desired effect of immediately stifling any intelligent analysis of his work. It seems people never change. 100 years after his death and what he predicted has come true. Western Society has sunk ever deeper and deeper into a feminine age. Western Society IS feminine: Absolutely material, devoid of a Soul, of any morality or ethics or religiousness. This is NOT because women have become stronger. As Otto clearly shows they are incapable of ever becoming anything other than they are by nature. It is that men have become weaker, less conscious, ie more feminine. Men have descended, thus giving the appearance that women have ascended. Thankyou so much Otto for your invaluable insights that have helped me to understand the nature of Man and especially woman. I suspect that when you wrote your work 100 years ago you knew it could only ever be understood and appreciated by the few rare Men of the World, of which you were one, and you wrote it for them. I owe you a debt of gratitude.
Men (you know who you are), I suggest you get a copy of Otto's timeless work now, before it disappears forever. I am still amazed that it is even available in this backward age of ours.
___________________________________________
6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Letting go of Otto, July 21, 2006
By M. Maguire (Madrid, Spain) - See all my reviews
I read Otto's Sex and Character years ago and for a long long time agreed with its conclusions about the nature of women wholeheartedly. However I would now like to say that my whole previous belief system that I held for many years about the nature of women, a belief that was confirmed and reinforced by Otto's work, is something that I now have serious doubts about. I now believe I was in a state of delusion all those years, and that all those thoughts, attitudes and assumptions that I held about the nature of women were completely false. Reading this book was not a search for knowledge, but a search for confirmation of my pre-existing misconceptions, from a male mind that could have been even more deluded about the nature of women than my own. Far from enlightening me it only sank me deeper into delusion. I can no longer trust a word or a single conclusion in this book. Actually I'm glad, as my whole attitude toward Women has now done an about turn and is a lot more healthy. I no longer believe Women are "soul-less" as Otto claims, but are spiritually equal to men in every way. Sorry sisters, for my previous delusional and harmful ideas about you. I recently threw this book away, it offers nothing positive, healthy or constructive for the mind.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Random book sampling, take 3!!!!
Just as time is extended into infinity because all temporal existence is finite and human beings strive to escape finiteness, the other mode of sensory experience, space, is thought to be infinite for the same reason. But liberation from time does not consist in an extension of linear time, however great, or indeed infinite, this extension may be, but in the negation of linear time. Eternity is not the longest time, but rather the shortest: it is a total abolition of time. In human beings the discontent with any specific period of time, with temporality, corresponds to a discontent with any specific space. The desire for eternity in the first instance is answered in the second by the desire for our true home, which we know is not located anywhere, at any concrete point, in the universe, but which we nevertheless continue to seek there, even though we can never find it: this is the origin of the infinity of space, since there is no boundary at which to rest and stop. It is only for this reason that we never stay at any one place but constantly embark on pilgrimages to new territories, just as we overcome every single period of time through our will to live. However, here also our striving is in vain. Space widens into infinity and yet remains space, and all our travels only take us from one restricted place to another.
Human bondage consists in being determined by space no less than by time; both are nothing but the will to escape from functionality, the will to freedom. But no matter how heroic a life of freedom is, even when it takes the form of a striving to overcome space, it must still have a tragic ending if it manifests itself in externals, such as the desire to travel- this love is also as unhappy as it is heroic.
*************
Whenever a man loves, he only loves himself. Not his subjectivity, not what he actually represents as a being tainted with every weakness and baseness, every gracelessness and pettiness, but what he wants to be completely and what he ought to be completely, his most personal and profound intelligible nature, free from any scrap of necessity and from any residue of his earthly nature. In his pursuits in time and space this being is subject to the impurities and limitations of the world of the senses, and he does not exist as a pure, radiant archetype.
However deep he may delve into himself, he will find himself turbid and stained, and what he seeks will present itself to him nowhere in white, immaculate purity. And yet there is nothing that he needs more urgently, nothing that he longs for more fervently, than being himself and only himself. But as he does not see the one thing he strives for, his goal, shining brightly and standing immovably firm in the depth of his own nature, he must make it easier to emulate by imagining it outside of himself. He projects his ideal of an absolutely valuable being, which he is unable to isolate within himself, on another human being, and that alone is meant by saying that he loves that human being. Only an individual who has done wrong and who feels that wrong is capable of this act: that is why a child cannot love. Love represents the highest, never attained, goal of all longing, as if it actually existed somewhere in the world of experience rather than merely in the world of ideas, and , by localizing this goal in a fellow=human, it reveals that in the lover himself the ideal is far from being fulfilled. That is the only reason why love is accompanied by a new awakening of the striving for purification, of the desire to reach a goal which is of the highest spiritual nature and which therefore tolerates no physical pollution through any approach to the loved one in space. That is also why love is the highest and strongest expression of the will to value, and that is why it reveals, more than anything in the world, the true nature of human beings, who are caught between mind and body, between sensuality and morality, and who have a part in both the god and the animal. A human being is himself, entirely and in every way, only when he loves. This explains why many people do not begin to believe in their own self and in that of others until they love.
So love, like hate is a result of a projection and not, like friendship, of an equation. The prerequisite of friendship is the equal value of both individuals, while love always posits inequality, unequal value. To love is to pile on one individual everything that we would like to be but never can be completely, and to make that individual a carrier of all values. The symbol of this supreme perfection is beauty. The common streetwalker never seems beautiful, because right from the outset it is impossible to project any value on her.
The next paragraph is ...icky..
"In general, woman's relationship with anything ethical is on of indifference. She is amoral, and therefore she can provide a foundation for the act of transferring value. Since she neither does good nor commits any sins, nothing in her or about her resists such a collocation of the ideal in her person. The beauty of woman is nothing but a morality that has become visible, but the morality itself is that of man, which he has transposed in its highest degree and perfection to woman."
All individual and temporally limited attempts at incarnation of beauty are illusory by their very nature, because they only simulate the perfection that is supposed to have been reached. That is why every individual beauty is transient, and any love for woman must endure being refuted by the old woman. The idea of beauty is the idea of nature, which is everlasting, even though every individual beauty and every natural phenomenon perishes. To see perfection itself in what is limited and concrete can only be an illusion, and to see it in the loved woman can only be an error. It is the most heroic attempt at asserting values where there are none.
Just as hate projects our own bad qualities on our fellow-humans in order to make that combination appear as a more effective deterrent, and just as the devil was invented only in order to portray all our evil urges outside us and to lend us the pride and strength of the fighter, the only purpose of love is to assist us in our fight for the good, which we are not yet strong enough to grasp as an idea within us.
.......
An individual I pity receives something from me, and in the act of pitying him I give him part of my imagined or real wealth; my help is thus only a visible embodiment of what was already implied in my compassion. If I love an individual, it is I who want something, or at least I do not want him to disturb my love through any ugly gestures or base characteristics. Through love I want to find myself, instead of continuing to seek and to strive. From the hand of a fellow-human I want to receive nothing less, and nothing other, than myself.
Compassion is modest because, by making others appear as my inferiors, it humiliates them. Love is modest because, by loving, I place myself below others. Love makes the individual most forgetful of his pride, and that is the weakness of which it is ashamed. Therefore compassion is related to love, which is why only those who know compassion know love. And yet the two exclude each other: we cannot love those we pity, and we cannot pity those we love. In compassion I myself am the fixed pole, in love it is the other: the directions, or algebraic signs, of the two affects are diametrically opposed. In compassion I am the giver, in love I am the beggar. Love is the most modest of all requests, because it begs for the most, the highest. That is why it turns so promptly into the most brusque, most vindictive pride if a careless or insensitive response of the loved one makes it conscious of what it really begged for.
The guilt a human being incurs through love is the wish to free himself from the sense of guilt which I described earlier as the prerequisite and precondition of any love. Instead of accepting all the wrong he has done and atoning for it through the rest of his life, he uses love as an attempt to escape from his own guilt, to forget it, and to be happy. Instead of actively realizing the idea of perfection, love tries to show the idea s if it had already been realized. By the most subtle ruse, it pretends that the miracle has happened in the other person, but the fact remains that the lover hopes to achieve his own liberation from evil without a struggle. Love itself is only a desire for redemption, and any desire for redemption is immoral. Love vaults over time and ignores causality; it tries to achieve purity suddenly and immediately, without any contribution of its own. That is why, being a miracle from outside instead of within, it is in itself impossible and can never fulfill its purpose, least of all in the case of those individuals who alone would have an immeasurably great capacity for it.
**************
The real psychology of the loved woman is always ignored in the process: as soon as a man loves a woman he ceases to see through her. Loving a woman is not entering into a relationship of understanding, which is the only moral relationship between human beings. One cannot love a human being whom one completely recognizes, because in that case one would be bound to see all the imperfections attached to him as a human being, whereas love always aims at perfection. Therefore love for a woman is possible only if this love, instead of taking any notice of her real qualities and considering her own wishes and interests insofar as they run counter to the localization of any higher values in her person, exercises no restraint in substituting a completely different reality for the psychic reality of the loved one. A man's attempt to find himself in a woman, rather than simply seeing Woman in a woman , necessarily presupposes a neglect of her empirical person. Such an attempt is extremely cruel to the woman; and this is the root of the selfishness of all love as well as the selfishness of jealousy, which regards Woman as a completely dependent possession and does not consider her inner life at all.
**************
Love alone engenders beauty. Do women have any relationship with beauty? It is not a mere figure of speech if one often hears women say "O, why should a man be beautiful?" It is no mere flattery, calculated to catch a man by his vanity, if a woman asks him what colours in a dress become her most: she cannot choose them by herself so that they will have an aesthetic effect. Even in her attire a woman will at best achieve an arrangement that reveals tastes, but no sense of beauty, without the help of a man. If Woman as such had any intrinsic beauty, or if she carried at least an original standard of beauty deep inside her, she would not constantly want to be assured by a man that she is beautiful.
Women, then, do not think Man really beautiful, and the more they bandy the word about, the more they give away how far they are from having any relationship with idea of beauty. The most accurate measure of the modesty of an individual is how often he uses the word " beautiful," which is a declaration of love to nature. If women longed for beauty they would utter its name less often. But they have no desire for beauty and they can have none, because they are only affected in that way by the socially accepted external appearance of things. Beauty is not what pleases. Although that definition is constantly being put forward, it is utterly wrong, and it runs directly counter to the meaning of the word itself. What pleases is pretty; beauty is what the individual loves. In order to regard something as beautiful, one needs, as one does for the objectivity of love, an individuality and not only individuation. Mere prettiness is social currency. Beauty is something that one loves, prettiness is something that people fall in love with. Love is always reaching out beyond itself, it is transcendent, because it stems from the inadequacy of the subject chained to subjectivity. Woman is at most in love, Man loves. The claim made by lamenting women that Woman is more capable of true love. Being in love resembles not the image of a parabola, as love does, but that of a closed circle, particularly in the case of Woman.
When a man has an individual effect on a woman it is not due to his beauty. Beauty, even if it manifests itself in a man, is appreciated only by a man. Woman ultimately regards anything that diverts Man from sexuality and procreation, his books and his politics, his science and his art, as her enemy. Only the sexual aspect of Man, not the asexual or transsexual, has any real effect on Woman, and she demands not beauty but absolute sexual desire from him. It is never the Apollonian element in Man that makes an impression on her, nor the Dionysian, but always, and to the greatest extent, the element of the faun in him; never the man, but always "le male"; it is above all his sexuality in the narrowest sense.
************************
Well I have typed enough if you want to read on go get the book. Or "retrieve your information from the web".
http://books.google.ca/books?id=iTOzhZ5MElYC
Human bondage consists in being determined by space no less than by time; both are nothing but the will to escape from functionality, the will to freedom. But no matter how heroic a life of freedom is, even when it takes the form of a striving to overcome space, it must still have a tragic ending if it manifests itself in externals, such as the desire to travel- this love is also as unhappy as it is heroic.
*************
Whenever a man loves, he only loves himself. Not his subjectivity, not what he actually represents as a being tainted with every weakness and baseness, every gracelessness and pettiness, but what he wants to be completely and what he ought to be completely, his most personal and profound intelligible nature, free from any scrap of necessity and from any residue of his earthly nature. In his pursuits in time and space this being is subject to the impurities and limitations of the world of the senses, and he does not exist as a pure, radiant archetype.
However deep he may delve into himself, he will find himself turbid and stained, and what he seeks will present itself to him nowhere in white, immaculate purity. And yet there is nothing that he needs more urgently, nothing that he longs for more fervently, than being himself and only himself. But as he does not see the one thing he strives for, his goal, shining brightly and standing immovably firm in the depth of his own nature, he must make it easier to emulate by imagining it outside of himself. He projects his ideal of an absolutely valuable being, which he is unable to isolate within himself, on another human being, and that alone is meant by saying that he loves that human being. Only an individual who has done wrong and who feels that wrong is capable of this act: that is why a child cannot love. Love represents the highest, never attained, goal of all longing, as if it actually existed somewhere in the world of experience rather than merely in the world of ideas, and , by localizing this goal in a fellow=human, it reveals that in the lover himself the ideal is far from being fulfilled. That is the only reason why love is accompanied by a new awakening of the striving for purification, of the desire to reach a goal which is of the highest spiritual nature and which therefore tolerates no physical pollution through any approach to the loved one in space. That is also why love is the highest and strongest expression of the will to value, and that is why it reveals, more than anything in the world, the true nature of human beings, who are caught between mind and body, between sensuality and morality, and who have a part in both the god and the animal. A human being is himself, entirely and in every way, only when he loves. This explains why many people do not begin to believe in their own self and in that of others until they love.
So love, like hate is a result of a projection and not, like friendship, of an equation. The prerequisite of friendship is the equal value of both individuals, while love always posits inequality, unequal value. To love is to pile on one individual everything that we would like to be but never can be completely, and to make that individual a carrier of all values. The symbol of this supreme perfection is beauty. The common streetwalker never seems beautiful, because right from the outset it is impossible to project any value on her.
The next paragraph is ...icky..
"In general, woman's relationship with anything ethical is on of indifference. She is amoral, and therefore she can provide a foundation for the act of transferring value. Since she neither does good nor commits any sins, nothing in her or about her resists such a collocation of the ideal in her person. The beauty of woman is nothing but a morality that has become visible, but the morality itself is that of man, which he has transposed in its highest degree and perfection to woman."
All individual and temporally limited attempts at incarnation of beauty are illusory by their very nature, because they only simulate the perfection that is supposed to have been reached. That is why every individual beauty is transient, and any love for woman must endure being refuted by the old woman. The idea of beauty is the idea of nature, which is everlasting, even though every individual beauty and every natural phenomenon perishes. To see perfection itself in what is limited and concrete can only be an illusion, and to see it in the loved woman can only be an error. It is the most heroic attempt at asserting values where there are none.
Just as hate projects our own bad qualities on our fellow-humans in order to make that combination appear as a more effective deterrent, and just as the devil was invented only in order to portray all our evil urges outside us and to lend us the pride and strength of the fighter, the only purpose of love is to assist us in our fight for the good, which we are not yet strong enough to grasp as an idea within us.
.......
An individual I pity receives something from me, and in the act of pitying him I give him part of my imagined or real wealth; my help is thus only a visible embodiment of what was already implied in my compassion. If I love an individual, it is I who want something, or at least I do not want him to disturb my love through any ugly gestures or base characteristics. Through love I want to find myself, instead of continuing to seek and to strive. From the hand of a fellow-human I want to receive nothing less, and nothing other, than myself.
Compassion is modest because, by making others appear as my inferiors, it humiliates them. Love is modest because, by loving, I place myself below others. Love makes the individual most forgetful of his pride, and that is the weakness of which it is ashamed. Therefore compassion is related to love, which is why only those who know compassion know love. And yet the two exclude each other: we cannot love those we pity, and we cannot pity those we love. In compassion I myself am the fixed pole, in love it is the other: the directions, or algebraic signs, of the two affects are diametrically opposed. In compassion I am the giver, in love I am the beggar. Love is the most modest of all requests, because it begs for the most, the highest. That is why it turns so promptly into the most brusque, most vindictive pride if a careless or insensitive response of the loved one makes it conscious of what it really begged for.
The guilt a human being incurs through love is the wish to free himself from the sense of guilt which I described earlier as the prerequisite and precondition of any love. Instead of accepting all the wrong he has done and atoning for it through the rest of his life, he uses love as an attempt to escape from his own guilt, to forget it, and to be happy. Instead of actively realizing the idea of perfection, love tries to show the idea s if it had already been realized. By the most subtle ruse, it pretends that the miracle has happened in the other person, but the fact remains that the lover hopes to achieve his own liberation from evil without a struggle. Love itself is only a desire for redemption, and any desire for redemption is immoral. Love vaults over time and ignores causality; it tries to achieve purity suddenly and immediately, without any contribution of its own. That is why, being a miracle from outside instead of within, it is in itself impossible and can never fulfill its purpose, least of all in the case of those individuals who alone would have an immeasurably great capacity for it.
**************
The real psychology of the loved woman is always ignored in the process: as soon as a man loves a woman he ceases to see through her. Loving a woman is not entering into a relationship of understanding, which is the only moral relationship between human beings. One cannot love a human being whom one completely recognizes, because in that case one would be bound to see all the imperfections attached to him as a human being, whereas love always aims at perfection. Therefore love for a woman is possible only if this love, instead of taking any notice of her real qualities and considering her own wishes and interests insofar as they run counter to the localization of any higher values in her person, exercises no restraint in substituting a completely different reality for the psychic reality of the loved one. A man's attempt to find himself in a woman, rather than simply seeing Woman in a woman , necessarily presupposes a neglect of her empirical person. Such an attempt is extremely cruel to the woman; and this is the root of the selfishness of all love as well as the selfishness of jealousy, which regards Woman as a completely dependent possession and does not consider her inner life at all.
**************
Love alone engenders beauty. Do women have any relationship with beauty? It is not a mere figure of speech if one often hears women say "O, why should a man be beautiful?" It is no mere flattery, calculated to catch a man by his vanity, if a woman asks him what colours in a dress become her most: she cannot choose them by herself so that they will have an aesthetic effect. Even in her attire a woman will at best achieve an arrangement that reveals tastes, but no sense of beauty, without the help of a man. If Woman as such had any intrinsic beauty, or if she carried at least an original standard of beauty deep inside her, she would not constantly want to be assured by a man that she is beautiful.
Women, then, do not think Man really beautiful, and the more they bandy the word about, the more they give away how far they are from having any relationship with idea of beauty. The most accurate measure of the modesty of an individual is how often he uses the word " beautiful," which is a declaration of love to nature. If women longed for beauty they would utter its name less often. But they have no desire for beauty and they can have none, because they are only affected in that way by the socially accepted external appearance of things. Beauty is not what pleases. Although that definition is constantly being put forward, it is utterly wrong, and it runs directly counter to the meaning of the word itself. What pleases is pretty; beauty is what the individual loves. In order to regard something as beautiful, one needs, as one does for the objectivity of love, an individuality and not only individuation. Mere prettiness is social currency. Beauty is something that one loves, prettiness is something that people fall in love with. Love is always reaching out beyond itself, it is transcendent, because it stems from the inadequacy of the subject chained to subjectivity. Woman is at most in love, Man loves. The claim made by lamenting women that Woman is more capable of true love. Being in love resembles not the image of a parabola, as love does, but that of a closed circle, particularly in the case of Woman.
When a man has an individual effect on a woman it is not due to his beauty. Beauty, even if it manifests itself in a man, is appreciated only by a man. Woman ultimately regards anything that diverts Man from sexuality and procreation, his books and his politics, his science and his art, as her enemy. Only the sexual aspect of Man, not the asexual or transsexual, has any real effect on Woman, and she demands not beauty but absolute sexual desire from him. It is never the Apollonian element in Man that makes an impression on her, nor the Dionysian, but always, and to the greatest extent, the element of the faun in him; never the man, but always "le male"; it is above all his sexuality in the narrowest sense.
************************
Well I have typed enough if you want to read on go get the book. Or "retrieve your information from the web".
http://books.google.ca/books?id=iTOzhZ5MElYC
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