As a secularist you are closed to the idea of the overman or the philosopher king with a quality of being greater than your idol the Great Beast. You must diminish them so they can show the proper respect.Nick, once again you show a significant lack of reading comprehension. First a few words about the quote from Nietzsche. The “great contempt” is not a contempt for happiness but of “your happiness”, that is, Christian happiness. It stands in contrast to “ my happiness” a happiness that “ought to justify existence itself.” You quote Nietzsche yet his perspective is opposed to yours. He does not condemn the pursuit of please. He condemns Christianity for its condemnation of pleasure. He rejects “objective truth”. He is responsible for perspectivism.
Nietzsche is simply saying acquiring the will to power requires abandoning wretched contentment. It is a psychological condition that transcends Christendom or man made Christianity. What could possibly make you think this tendency is limited to Christendom or man made Christianity?
Of course. A person isn’t born a philosopher king. They have to become one. It requires acquiring knowledge of the GOOD, the will to power, and the conscious understanding making it possible to abandon this power in service to the greater GOOD. Only certain people are capable. There is nothing wrong with being a guardian, It is just a lower quality of being than a philosopher king. As we are, we can only consciously contemplate the rational cosmic order. Sometimes it opens us to intuitive reason leading to understanding beyond the limits of linear dualistic reason.Whether or not there is such a unity is “beyond the boundaries of human understanding”. Plato describes a “rational cosmic order” “based on conjecture and speculation”.
The soul already knows. It just must turn to the light. The outer man attached to the shadows on the wall cannot be free to turn. When the inner man turns, the outer man can follow.Plato largely confines himself to the depiction of the good soul and the good for the soul, evidently on the assumption that the state of the soul is the condition of the good life, both necessary and sufficient to guarantee it.
The good life is not the life of the unity of inner soul and the cosmos simply because, as the article says, we are not capable of knowing the whole. Hence:
The good life is defined by the state of the soul.
But the reason of a philosopher king leads to a quality of being capable of grasping wholeness impossible for the Beast. As we are we cannot be governed by reason. We are hypocrites and in opposition with ourselves. Our emotional states are dominated by negative emotions cheapening reason into strictly pragmatic egoistic concerns. The philosopher king and those who have opened to the third direction of thought are capable of top down reason. Esoteric work simply means efforts to enable the appetites to serve top down reason with the emotions awakening to the objective values which give reason the experience of “meaning.”In terms you might understand he takes a practical view with regard to the Great Beast. Plato’s position is, as I have said before, fundamentally at odds with your own. Plato is not advocating transcendence but reason. If, as the microcosm, we are to be in harmony with the macrocosm this can only be attained to the extent that our lives are governed by reason. It cannot be what you have referred to as “top down reason” simply because we cannot start at the top. To claim that we can is unreasonable. The human perspective is not from the standpoint of knowledge of the whole.
The overman, the ultimate in horizontal human psychology as compared to the philosopher king, the ultimate following the vertical path of human being leading in the direction of the GOOD. Can you imagine a group of secularists arguing this. Lord have mercy.