seeing how easily Luna tricked all of us with putting in very little effort compared to how much Alice would have had to put in to keep up a fake gf puppet for this long, it just doesn't make sense unless Alice was very very bored but i dont think its possible to be that bored and invest this much time into a catfish when comparitively Luna didnt invest much at all into it
Continued.....
"Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was
vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a
point by, Romanticism - the idea of the "People" in the moral-enthusiastic
sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new
ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question
that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus - What was, the name
of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem
is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but
it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of
events must necessarily be erroneous. "The people" as the absolute basic form
in which men are historically effective, the original home, the original settlement, the migrations of "the" peoples - all this is a reflection of the vibrant
idea expressed in the "Nation" of 1789, of the" Voll" of 1813, both of which,
in last analysis, are derived from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism.
But the very intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only
too well from criticism. Even acute" investigators have unwittingly made it
cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that "peoples"
have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood unit-quantities
by which all history is made. For us, to-day, world-history means T what it
cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently, or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks
and the Chinese - the history of Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech,
wit, religion, is created by the peoples. The State is the form of a people.
The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What
has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not "peoples." In the first
instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of
parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes
confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike
side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race.
Tribes, septs, clans, families - all these are designations for the fact of a blood
which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape."
"But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life,
in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which
the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another
I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression
that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique
of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching
to signs.
In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language 1 the
efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual
beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless
they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one
another.
But, further, we shall never understand man's higher history if we ignore
the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as
derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different
Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin,
development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and
duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is
something cosmic and psychic (Seelenft), periodic in some obscure way, and in its
inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.
Languages, on the other hand, are causal· forms, and operate through the
polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings
of the words" time" and "yearning"; to language those of the words .. space"
and "fear." But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying
idea of "peoples."
There are, then, currents of being and linkages of waking-being. The former
have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race, as seen in the picture
of the world-around, is the aggregate of all bodily characters so far as these
exist for the sense-perceptions of conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops and fulfills from childhood to old age the specific
inner form that was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at
the same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually remains
in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of this all that we
know is so much as presents itself in the world of waking-consciousness.
Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears in the light-world of his eye, so that for
. him race is essentially a sum of visible characters. But even for him there are not inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters such as
smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities of human speech. In
the other higher animals, on the contrary, the capacity to receive the impression
of race is decidedly not dominated by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the
animals have modes of sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is.
however, only men and animals that can receive the impression of race, and not the
plants, and yet these too have race, as every nurseryman knows. It is, to me. a
sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers,. craving to fertilize and be
fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendour attract one another, or even see
one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours
and these scents exist."
People and Nation - Spengler
On peoples....
"For me, the "people" is a unit of the soul. The great events of history were not really achieved by people; they themselves created the peoples. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the Osmanli what they afterwards were. The "Americans" did not immigrate from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci designates today not only a continent but also a people in the true sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual upheavals of 1775 and, above all, 1861-5.
This is one and only connotation of the word "people". Neither unity of speech nor physical decent is decisive. That which distinguishes a people from a population, raises it up out of the population and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the "we". The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The name Roman in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population."
"I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set fourth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour that the great cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and moulded posses style and style-history no less than kinds of art and modes of thought. The peoples of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishmen not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian,and Faustian cast. The Arabian culture was not created by "the Arabs" - quite the contrary, for the Magian Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents its last great creation of that kind, a community bounded by Islam as the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bounded by their religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these cultures fulfill their Destinies."
On nations....
"Peoples in the style of their culture we will call Nations, the word itself distinguishes them from the forms that precede and that follow them, It is not merely a strong feeling of "we" that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; underlying the nations there is an idea. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and Classical people differ, so too the styles of their histories.
Life as experienced by primitive and fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world-history, are the nations."
"because certain cultural progressions are not truly of the people but of the influencing minority within that culture and therefore it would be false attribution to assume that an individual within any particular culture must be a certain way in adherence with that cultures accomplishments. "
the very point is that those accomplishments are a byproduct of that culture, culture ultimately decides the tendencies of the philosophers and common man alike, these tendencies manifest themselves in their work, the contrast between the infinitude of calculus and the finitude of euclidean mathematic, mathematicians at the time who would burn and shun anyone who suggested that irrational numbers exist
so yes, those progressions are certainly attributable to the tendencies of that culture, newton could have just been as intelligent as euclid, but they had different tendencies due to their cultures which manifested themselves in mathematics
"because certain cultural progressions are not truly of the people but of the influencing minority within that culture and therefore it would be false attribution to assume that an individual within any particular culture must be a certain way in adherence with that cultures accomplishments. "
the very point is that those accomplishments are a byproduct of that culture, culture ultimately decides the tendencies of the philosophers and common man alike, these tendencies manifest themselves in their work, the contrast between the infinitude of calculus and the finitude of euclidean mathematic, mathematicians at the time who would burn and shun anyone who suggested that irrational numbers exist
so yes, those progressions are certainly attributable to the tendencies of that culture, newton could have just been as intelligent as euclid, but they had different tendencies due to their cultures which manifested themselves in mathematics
Indeed.
Culture in its aboriginal stage is pure potentiality. The potentiality is whole hardily spiritual and born out of the tempo of the landscape, not the people. The birth of form is the sign a true culture has immerged from the landscape, for form is the actualization of the cultures potential and that potential is informed by the culture’s soul solidifying. Thus, only in the context of culture can a people actualize form and that context determines what can be actualized.
Mathematic is a great signifier of the differences between cultures across time. A Mathematic manifests almost always towards the end of the middle-culture, this makes it ideal for studying culture because it so clearly sits in the context of the cultures soul as it’s manifested into Architecture, which is actualized during the low culture, and art-form, which is actualized at the start of the middle-culture phase. The contrast between the Classical mathematic and the Modernist mathematic is night and day. They not only sit firmly in their induvial cultures but the role their cultures played in their actualization is so clearly visible. Both mathematics can be seen in the womb of the architecture that signified their low culture phase.
For Classical culture, that womb was the Doric Order. The Doric Order reveals the soul of the Classical culture, a culture obsessed with the visible and bounded. The Doric temple portrays its visibility by being an object to be viewed from the outside, its artistry being solely etched as the flutes on its columns and triglyphs on its entabliture. The Doric’s bounded nature reflects the forbidden space that is its center, it is a building whose inside does not exist for only its exterior defines it and as such only its exterior can be.
Within 200 years of the Doric order we find Pythagoras, the great figure who will reveal the mathematic in the stone. The Pythagorean Theorem, specifically the Greek proof, is a synchronicity between the Greek architecture that signifies the Classical soul and the Greek mathematic which matures it. The famous a^2+b^2=c^2, as we know it today, was formulated by Pythagoras via a uniquely Greek methodology, magnitude as construction. What separates the Classical mathematic from the Faustian is the definition of number. The Classical soul defines number as magnitude, a sense of number that is qualitative instead of quantitative, a group of such magnitudes revealing the beauty of the Greek mathematic, the construction of proportionality. Where we have operation the Greeks have construction, a methodology which does nothing but affirm the visibility of the Classical style by revealing not fraction but bounded proportional figures. Pythagoras’s proof is figure bounded by figures, the proportionality of the outer figures making visible the proportionality of the inner figures with all the emphasis on the boundaries themselves and not the spaces they contain. The climax of the Greek mathematic is under Euclid at the end of the Middle period, a man who take the sum of the Classical mathematical experience and turns it into law with his Elements. By doing so he begins the process de-worlding nature, making it synthetic as its secrets may now be found in a text instead of the world itself. The de-worlding of nature is furthered by the last great mathematicians to reveal the Classical soul and push into pure synthetic abstraction, Archimedes and Apollonius. Archimedes portrays the finitude of infinite with his measure of circles ultimately taking infinite edges and bounding them under a curve. Apollonius with his conics dewrolds nature further by building a sense of a bounded 3-dimesions into his constructions. The work of Archimedes and Apollonius are signals of the end of the Classical high culture, their abstractions showing the disconnect between the Classical man’s new art and reality. This becomes ever so clearer as mathematics marches on into the Civilizational period under the Romans in which Neoplatonism is adopted by the likes of Iambilichus and his purely religious science.
There is no doubt that Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, and Iambilichus were all great intelligent men, but they existed within a context and that context determined the style of their works, just as a landscape determines the fruits that may grow in it. They are merely vessels in which the potential of their culture may be actualized, unique within the confines of their history but by no means unique in the context of histories.
I will contrast this with the Faustian upbringing in a later post.
