Aditya

you went to a real SF party this weekend if you talked about - openclaw and how it’s a paradigm shift but also zomg so unsafe - peptides - how impossible dating in SF is - AI agents replacing everyone - the Anthropic tender driving up housing prices - creatine

You’re doomed to fail the moment you frame the endeavor as “understand ourselves and what we want.” It is a functional atheism that, by presupposing the self as the salient scope of awareness rather than God, eliminates the possibility of transcendent heroism (redundant). The Odyssey only works if Achilles is the son of a god, and Faust only works if there’s a devil for him to make a bargain with. It’s also why Christ is the Great Man of history.

i’m not really romanticizing pre-linguistic consciousness. more so claiming that the ancients had no distinction between an “inner world” and the implied “outer” world, which can be intuited by suspending the impulse to discretize reality into consumable, propositional form. language can be one mechanism of discretization, but it doesn’t mean all language has that effect. eg the Symposium is obv a linguistic description of love but one that supposes a univocal/analogical relation between man’s love and Divine love, ie Beauty. my point about early Wittgenstein is that Tractatus demonstrated that propositional language fails to exhaustively capture reality, insofar as it can only capture a “state of affairs” and not more (eg the logical form by which all states of affairs relate, bc to “propositionalize” this could only capture a particular state of affairs). but it doesn’t dispute the possibility of language that “shows” (rather than says/describes) beyond the boundary. “The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni [under the aspect of eternity] is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.” (Tractatus 6:45) this reference to Spinoza (and his love for Tagore) shows that he rejects propositional language (ie empirical language) as pertaining to beyond the boundary but not “constitutive” language so to speak, ie, “God” or “Being” or “eternity”. they may be “nonsense” in the propositional sense but still revelatory. in other words, the exercise suspends a very particular kind of language that renders the world as a mere state of affairs and obscures its sheer facticity/representation of the limited whole. to see the world in this way by default is the privilege of the ancients, to ascertain it via constitutive language is the genius of Plato, and to know it intimately is the gift of Christ.

I hate to be that guy but it is prob both true that - the ancients did not have an “inner world” in the way that we think they did - they had better lives as a result and retardmaxxing is the wrong solution to the right diagnosis Try this 10 second exercise, you’ll see what I mean. Look at your phone/laptop and answer the question “what is this object” WITHOUT using any words. You should start to feel a tingling at the back of your head, maybe even a sense of anxiety. Do this for a day* and you will understand - Plato - Genesis chapter 2 / John chapter 1 - early Wittgenstein - basic angelology - Lana del Rey - why Guenon/Evola hated fascism - why psychedelics are stupid - why Kant is a bastard who should be put on trial for the murder of philosophy and every patriot should spit on his grave There’s a lot of evidence that this is the default state of the ancients, unmediated by the post-Industrial excess of information/categories. So when Marcus Aurelius tells you he’s sad, he’s probably experiencing something very different from you and me. * heads up if do this for > 1 week you will genuinely go insane. speaking from partial experience. would not recommend

if you introspected a bit more after reading the tweet you’d note that I wasn’t rejecting the idea of ancient self reflection per se but rather the idea of an “inner world” fundamentally detached from the implied “outer” world both St. Paul’s (1 Corinthians 2, Acts 17) and St. Augustine’s (divine illumination and premotion) psychologies reveal a fundamentally different understanding of the division between self/world than the modern Lockean notion of an enclosed inner sense