Current Controversies of Society and other Philosophical Tribulations © (2002) by nilum.com The following is a collection of emails I wrote to a friend which I admire a lot for his achievements. The text should be regarded as personal opinion. If that still offends you, simply read it as pure fiction playing in a fantasy world called "civilization" at the edge of collapse. Any similarity with existing persons or organizations or nation-states is accidentally.

the coward is hiding behind sunglasses! click on the photo to enlarge the portrait of Scrutinizer

I learned a lot from reading Colin Wilson's (CW) "Outsider" and found his interpretations of the works of schopenhauer, wagner, and nietzsche and the conclusions he draws for the characterization of the outsider and for his "new existentialism" very enlightening.

Nietzsche was able to reproduce at will so-called "peak experiences" through mental concentration.

Sometimes he was almost blind, because he had swollen eyes, because he wept too much, not sentimantal tears, but tears of joy over the calm and peace spread over the mountains and forests.

Quote Nietzsche: "I'm one of the machines that sometimes explode."

sounds much like the risks Van Gough took for his work and Pascal's "pleurs de joie".

CW did not elaborate about the use of the word "machine".

Stuart Kauffman (SK), a medical doctor, computer scientist, and biologist, who devoded 30 years to research the secret of life at Santa Fee institute before he wrote his book "At Home in Universe" elaborates on this machine. Although the secret of the creation of life is not yet revealed, SK pausibly shows that mathematics created live and Boole's binary functions laid the foundations for us to understand the logic behind.

The Fibonacci series has beautiful mathematical properties. In organic and non-organic organisms, it appears as phyllotaxis. This so-called devine section is a simple mathematical relation which is a property of (all?) visible objects which we feel are beautiful.

If I take SK's definition, life means being able to reproduce. (This definition is of course questionable this definition. Is a woman after menopause without life? Menopause stops reproduction, but life must continue for women in order to care about the younger children at least until they stand on their own. every definition has a goal and the definition "life is reproduction" is quite useful; without reproduction no life.)

Sperm and egg each in isolation are not living organisms since they can't reproduce. Sperm and egg each are matter, but together they carry information which provide for the interpretation (execution) of this information (create a life from a "blue-print"). (What about those species without sexual reproduction? All living beings we know who emerge with free will and self-consciousness use sexual reproduction. one of the advantage of sexual reproduction is that through recombination it allows evolution to explore the space between the parents' genes. this creates more variety in a shorter time in order to adapt to new enviroment. )

The information contains both, the code for interpreter plus the blue-print of father and mother. Matter is deterministic. Can deterministic (non-living) substance create a living being which is conscious of itself and be free? Have a free will? Deterministic means decidable. This contradicts our feeling that we are free to make decisions and our ability to remember ourselves.

Is freedom an illusion? (with freedom I meant human free will, being free to make a decision; of course even this freedom is very limited in a civilization and we are only free in the moment when we mentally make a decision.)

Isn't our free will limited by the perplexities of our intellect, as Pascal argued?

These are the questions CW tries to answer.

I believe intellect is our capability to reprogram ourselves to adapt to changes in environment. Unfortunately, Goedel's "undecidability" shows the limits of studying ourselves if we are a closed mathematical system.

Computer science students usually have to study Goedel and are required to understand the "Halteproblem". Goedel's theorem helped to prove that no program (software) exists that could decide upon inspection whether any arbitrary program is error free (halts in finite time) or not (does not halt). if such a program would exist, one would of course apply it to itself, to check whether it itself is error free. Goedel's theorem proved that this is impossible. Did you read the book "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter? Highly recommended! More advanced reading: "Goedel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel, James Roy Newman, Douglas R. Hofstadter

Ever since I've read R. Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene", I'm interested in evolution and how consciousness can be created from pure information (code). If we found out how, computer code could be made conscious of itself and computer scientists would have a very interesting object to manipulate. ;-)

Dawkins is a very good writer, but his theory of selection and mutation is not plausible. He is most probably right, that there was no creator. SK showed that the creation of life is not propable with Darwin/Dawkins' selection and mutation alone; SK believes (but can not yet prove) that life initially emerged through self-organization from complexity at the edge of chaos according to mathematical laws.

I do not want to write another biography of FN nor could I write a summary of FN's work, but I want to give you a short summary of what CW writes about FN, so that maybe you could judge if CW (and FN) is worth reading (contains some quotes from the pages 121 to 146):

CW writes that most of books on FN that he knew are either misinformed, or unfair; the major exception being Daniel Halevy's biography.

You might already know that FN was a romantic and deeply influenced by Novalis who tought him that (quote CW) "every man is potentially hero and genius; that inertia keeps men mediocre." Schopenhauer (S) convinced FN (when he was barely 20), that it were the destiny of a genius to live alone. In respect to "Escapism", FN's Zarathustra said in "The Way of the Creator": " 'All solitude is sin', says the herd. And long enough were you yourself part of the herd." FN was completely alone and felt he was the only healthy man in a sick universe. S's philosophy provided FN with the detachement from himself which is required to gain self-knowledge.

FN experienced that the will to life does not emerge from our struggle to exist, but in the will to power (to war as ultimate expression of that will). At 28, FN rejected most philosophers and literary men of his day and stood alone, except for S and Wagner, for whom he still felt respect. Later he also rejected S and also broke with W.

He wrote no single work which could be called 'the essence of FN'. His ill-health, a legacy from his Army period (in another chapter CW mentions FN's veneral disease) and the negative effects of his sendentary way of life acted as brakes on his creativity. His sanest and best-argued books provoked Germany's guardians of culture to accuse him of extravagant self-worship or insanity.

His two great concepts, the Superman and the Eternal Recurrence (is happiness a delusion? the struggle between yes and no. could a man exist who could say finally: I accept everything?) By constant meditation, the will to live can be deepened, to commit oneself by an act of faith to affirm life at all costs.

What "pure will, free of troubles of the intellect", meant to him is fundamentally similar to Blakes vision. Existentialism is seen to be the gospel of the will, but the will to more abundant life should not be made the slave of the ideal.

FN stood completely alone as a prophet, who at first believed it was a 'will to truth at all costs' that drove him, but later deepened that to will to life, to consciousness, to the infusion of spirit into dead matter. It might have been the end of the problem, if our civilization were two thousand years younger, because he wanted to start a new religion, which he thought was necessary.

under the right circumstances, FN would have had the strength to bring about a spiritual revival; instead he died insane. The new religion was never born. FN was misunderstood, more by neurotics who claimed to be Nietzscheans than by his enemies. It is an immense problem. FN solved the body-emotions-intellect equation: A Outsider is a prophet in disguise, disguised even of himself - whose salvation lies in the discovering his deepest purpose, and then throwing himself into it.

FN has no tendency towards a Sartre doctrine of commitment - that any purpose will do provided it is altruistic. FN discovered that intellect is not enough, yet he remained a philosopher. Yet Zarathustra made it clear that the answer lies toward the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. (Russia is one of the few nations who produced great novelists who combined the two faculties. CW continues the next chapter to answer the question of identity by writing about Tolstoy.)

In the essay "Überleben" by Martin Meyer, Sep-2002 (only available in German), I found more about FN. (summary todo.)

That closes my summary on what CW wrote about FN.

Not only that "infusion of spirit into dead matter" grasped my attention. If what CW writes is true, FN was a genius.

CW believes and writes about in his newer books, that such highly intelligent men already existed on earth many thousand years ago. They died when the poles shifted under the ice of the antartic, but they left signs and instructions for us to interpret.

Speculation or not - his theory might be easier to [dis]prove than to find out, how the first reproductive organism emerged from dead matter and how [while shifting their blue-print through] dead matter [during reproduction] can transform itself into a conscious being?

Do you know the famous frænch mathematician Laurent Schwartz, (died 04-July-2002, his biography in frænch ) - now about 90 years old and until his dead still working in maths? What Michio Kitahara calls regression in civilization, nicely fits his conception called "degeneration" in frænch.

Oswald Spengler wrote that different civilizations do not understand each other. that's one of the main problem with the frænch - by the way sounds and feels to me very much like "fraud". I don't know well other countries, but the frænch civilization is completely build upon fraud! on the other hand, if one is flexible enough in order to profit from such behaviour (without being forced to defraud others) one can live in more freedom than in Germany (which degenerated very much since many years - simply try to drive a car on a german "Autobahn". from the other few countries I know, only Italy (and of course Russia) is worse in that respect.)

according to matt ridley's "genome" -if we are like rats- our instinct is genetically inherited (how is another question) from our father and dominates our behaviour from age 40 on. education more or less suppresses our instinct in younger age and then gradually dimishes and instinct takes over.

those wo are "in power" of wealth or business or politics are usually older than 40.

genetically populations are different even within one and the same nation. so I doubt romans or habsburg had much of an influence. from what I learned reading Rose Wilder Lane's "Discovery of Freedom" (which contains a good overview of history), native southern frånce people are genetically more determined by turkey, mid-asia and northern africa (the so-called "sarazins"). I'm not talking about immigrants. I mean the "native" people from the Midi (Provence) - without wanting to express any racism. It is also well possible that people during the last 100 years resigned to be souvereign individuals, because being misled by government, they were forced to abandon any trust in that oppresive entity and try to live without relying in centralized nation state of frånce.

it seems only 5% of a population determine the fate of a region or population or nation. it is well possible that in southern frånce the majority of these 5% are sarazinians.

from an educational view most people in frånce are trained socialists and many who are not so bright do not even recognize that fact, what frænch national education did to them.

about 50% of the people (the brighter ones) are employed in so-called public service in frånce. they usually retire early. sometimes as early as 41 to 45 for military and gendarmerie. teachers and many other "fonctionaires" with 55 years. these fonctionaires establish the infrastructure which enables them to exploit the lower-salary working-class. of course the fonctionaires are bright enough to recognize the fraud, which on the other hand allows them to earn a good salary and early retirement. most of the brighter fonctionaires are not socialists (although they might tell you they were), but they are not shy to profit from it by applying their power to enforce the socialism, nothing more than an ideology, on their subjects.

I know only few people from the north of frånce. they seem to be more similar to for example the Germans. The people from the north of frånce are sometimes as astonished as I am about the tribulations in the south. my newest theory about the [southern] frænch is that they did not have Enlightenment (see "Dialectic of Enlightenment"; Adorno's text is essentially a tractat about FN. The name Nietzsche occurs 39 times in this book, together with extensive quotes, all over the places - without counting the appearances in the notes. So it may be fair to say, that Nietzsche is the main topic of Adorno's book which the book's title should reflect.)

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, from so-called Frankfurt school, otherwise not my favorite writer due to his Marxist tendency, wrote in June 1947, quote (my translation from German):

"Testimonials of Humanity"

"France was a home for humanity more than any other country. But the French did no longer know anything of it. What was written in their books, was ideology, which everybody knew already. The better [remainings of humanity] still had a seperate existence in the sound of the voice, in wording, in sophisticated cooking and eating, in the existence of brothels, the cast-iron pissoirs."

Having missed [or degenerated or lost knowledge of] enlightenment, could be the reason for their indifference to other peoples' fate. they live their own life like no other egoist, but they like socialism only if they can profit from it.

in a country where there are so many stupid or indifferent people, the few brighter ones make an easy living. suppression results in resignation, which makes it easier for government to control and regulate their subjects.

... the second half of this article is only available on special request; please contact the author. (I learned from Nietzsche to say Yeah! to everything. :-) Anyway, you might enjoy the last paragraph of the full article: