#especially since it seems to be for the sole purpose of providing arthur with a love interest

[eliounora]

listen I have a feeble grasp on the legend but one of my fave motifs has been guinevere and lancelot's great love and I'm kinda bummed this show isn't going for that. nevertheless. the way he turned back to look at her

[vergess]

speaking of gender markers i was reading that part and thought hm. purposeful parallels, in sync despite being on opposite hills. but really contrasting. All at once two voices shouted out to, "Halt!" One was my Jonathan's, raised in a high key of passion. The other Mr. Morris' strong resolute tone of quiet command.

van helsing had said that the laconic quincey was ''all man'', he is and looks like a rugged adventurer, likely tall and burly. and here i think that despite that he's american he acts like a british masculine ideal in this scene.

jonathan in contrast is all loud, passionate emotion. high emotion vs quiet command. also unlike quincey he looks frail- mina says he only started putting some meat on his bones late september, and since oct it's implied he's been neglecting himself. seward says his hands are ice cold. he's holding a blood-seeking "barbaric" weapon. he resembles more of a madman than the ideal hero.

Oh that is SUCH a good point.

Far and away, the character that my analytical relationship is weakest with is Quincey. I may not have fun talking about Dracula or Arthur the way I do Seward and the Harkers, but I at least understand their characters and can play with concepts around them (eg, I do actually know that Lucy is not symbolically associated with Gwenhwyffar save in the sense that she is the wife of their highest ranking guy, a british noble named Arthur, and people being little shits about that in the tags of my posts are more than welcome to make their own name posts about these characters because this is a non-scarcity scenario, THANKS)

But Quincey is like... Okay literally until the day he died, I had one (1) joke about Quincey, and it was that Bram Stoker clearly had a cowboy fetish.

Which made the emotional impact of his death and his little Gilgamesh acting three-parents ghost baby, VERY CONFUSING for me. Like WHY did I care so much?? How did his whole "stoic nod.GIF" and "Thank you kindly, little lady" shit SNEAK UP ON ME????

(Hint: Regardless of Stoker's situation, I do have a cowboy fetish so not thinking about Quincey may have been a survival strategy lol)

But Quincey acting as this impossible paragon of masculinity in isolation provides a great framework for me to examine him, especially in contrast to how blatantly and constantly GNC that... well, almost everyone around him is.

I say impossible, because as you point out, in his final scene Quincey is presenting a very English type of masculinity. Not even British, IMO. That's all England.

But that very English masculinity is, necessarily, incompatible with the Rugged American Masculinity he has been written to exude.

No, that's not right... the Rugged American Masculinity everyone keeps saying he exudes, while he primarily does insane nonsense.

Quincey is indeed "all man," in that he can and well become a paragon of whatever cultural ideal of masculinity is needed in any scene. Mutable in execution, yes, but always something you could summarize as "A Good Man," and get nods from everyone listening.

Which makes it all the more interesting that he seems (based on the novel I read, not any secondary sources) to have been written in solely to be impotent, impotent, impotent, then die in glory.

Hmm, hmm, hmm. Lots to consider!!

[stoicanalyst]

The Darkest Philosopher in History - Arthur Schopenhauer

Being one of the first philosophers to ever 

really question the value of existence,  

to systematically combine eastern 

and western modes of thinking,  

and to introduce the arts as a serious 

philosophical focus, Arthur Schopenhauer  

is perhaps one of the darkest and most 

comprehensive philosophers in western history. 

Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in what is 

now Gdansk, Poland, but spent the majority  

of his childhood in Hamburg, Germany after 

his family moved there when he was five.  

He was born to a wealthy family, his father 

being a highly successful international merchant.  

As a result of this, young Schopenhauer would 

be expected to follow in his father’s footsteps.  

However, from an early age, he had no interest 

in business, and instead, found himself compelled  

towards academics. And after going on a trip 

around Europe with his parents to prepare him  

for his merchant career, the greater exposure 

he would receive to the pervasive suffering  

and poverty of the world would cause him to 

become all the more interested in pursuing  

the path of scholarship and intellectually 

examining, down to its very core, how the  

world worked and why—or perhaps more accurately, 

how and why it appeared to work so negatively. 

After eventually going against his family’s 

readymade path of international business,  

Schopenhauer would attend the University of 

Göttingen in 1809, where, in his third semester,  

he would become more introduced and 

focused on philosophy. The following year,  

he would transfer to the University of Berlin 

to study under a better philosophy program led  

by distinguished philosophy lecturers of the 

time.

However, Schopenhauer would soon find  

academic philosophy to be unnecessarily obscure, 

detached from real concerns of life, and often  

tethered to theological agendas; all of which, 

he despised. Eventually, he left the academic,  

intellectual circuit, and spent the following 

decade philosophizing and writing on his own. 

By age thirty, Schopenhauer had published 

the two works that would go on to define  

his entire career, contain his complete, 

unified philosophical system from which  

he would never deviate, and eventually influence 

the entire course of western thinking with.  

The first groundwork of his philosophy 

was established in his dissertation,  

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle 

of Sufficient Reason, published in 1813,  

and his entire unified philosophical system, 

including his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics,  

aesthetics, value judgments, and so forth, 

was laid out in his subsequent masterwork,  

The World as Will and Representation, published 

in 1819. Despite these impressive works going on  

to hold major stake in western philosophy, 

influencing some of the greatest thinkers  

and schools of thought thereafter, during 

this time, they would go mostly unnoticed. 

Over the decades following his early 

work, throughout his thirties and forties,  

Schopenhauer would spend his time working to be a 

lecturer at university, as well as a translator of  

French to English prose, while continuing to write 

on-and-off along the side. He found very little  

success in all of it. His lectures were unpopular, 

his translations received very little interest,  

and his philosophical work remained mostly 

overlooked. Only by around his fifties,  

did Schopenhauer finally start to receive 

any notable recognition, at all.

And only  

after publishing a book of essays and aphorisms 

in 1851, would he achieve the status of fame,  

which he would remain in for the rest of his life 

until he died in 1860 at the age of seventy-two. 

In terms of Schopenhauer’s philosophical system 

established within his work, it is relevant to  

note that it leaned heavily on the work of his 

predecessor, Immanuel Kant. In Schopenhauer’s  

mind, he was completing Kant’s system of 

transcendental idealism. Building off his  

interpretation of Kant, Schopenhauer essentially 

suggested that the world as we know and experience  

it, is exclusively a representation created by our 

mind through our senses and forms of cognition.  

Consequently, we cannot access the true 

nature of external objects outside our mental,  

phenomenological experience of them. Deviating 

from Kant, however, Schopenhauer would go onto to  

argue that not only can we not know nor access the 

varying objects of the world as they really are  

outside of our conscious experience, but 

there is, in fact, no plurality of objects  

beyond our experience, at all. Rather, beyond 

our experience is, according to Schopenhauer,  

a singular, unified oneness of reality—a sort 

of essence or force that drives existence  

that is beyond time, beyond space, and beyond all 

objectivation. Schopenhauer would go on to explore  

and define this force by referencing and probing 

into the experience of living within the body,  

suggesting that this is the only thing 

in the world that we have access to  

that is not solely a mental representation of 

an object but is also a firsthand, subjective  

experience from within it. From here, Schopenhauer 

would suggest that what is found from within,  

at the core of our being, is an unconscious, 

restless, striving force towards survival,  

nourishment, and reproduction. He would term this 

force the Will to live.

Essentially, this would  

lead him to the conclusion that reality is made 

up of two sides; one side being the plurality  

of things as they are represented to a conscious 

apparatus, and the other side being the singular,  

unified force of the Will—hence the name of his 

master work, The World as Will and Representation. 

It is worth noting that the term Will can 

perhaps be misleading in that it might seem  

to imply an intention or human-like conscious 

motivation, but the Will, for Schopenhauer,  

is a blind, unconscious striving with no goal 

or purpose other than to keep itself going  

for the sake of keeping itself going. All of the 

material world operates by and through this Will,  

moving, striving, consuming, and violently 

expressing itself in order to sustain itself. 

Schopenhauer’s work was largely a response to 

Kant and the western philosophical tradition,  

but his work also contains distinct notes of 

Hinduism and Buddhism. His conclusion of the  

nature of reality is strikingly similar to that of 

both. And his qualitative assessment of reality’s  

negative relationship with the conscious self 

mirrors ideas central to Buddhism. This made  

Schopenhauer one of the first philosophers to 

ever really combine eastern and western thinking  

in such a systematically comprehensive way.

Especially similar to Buddhism, Schopenhauer  

would top off his philosophical medley with a 

layer of dark, unwavering pessimism. “Unless  

suffering is the direct and immediate object of 

life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.  

It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount 

of pain that abounds everywhere in the world,  

and originates in needs and necessities 

inseparable from life itself, as serving no  

purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each 

separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt,  

to be something exceptional; but misfortune in 

general is the rule.” Schopenhauer wrote. As a  

qualitative assessment of the nature of reality, 

he would describe the Will to live as a sort of  

malevolent force that we, as individual selves, 

become victims of in its process of continuation,  

deceived by our own mind and body to go against 

our fundamental interests and yearnings in order  

to carry it out. Since the Will has no aim or 

purpose other than its perpetual continuation,  

then the will can never be satisfied. And 

since we are expressions of it, neither can we.  

Thus, we are driven to consume beings, things, 

ideas, goals, circumstances, and all the rest,  

constantly hoping we will feel a satisfaction or 

happiness as result, while constantly being left  

in the wake of each achievement unsatisfied. 

"Human life must be some kind of mistake.  

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if 

we only remember that man is a compound of needs  

and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even 

when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state  

of painlessness, where nothing remains to him 

but abandonment to boredom.” Schopenhauer wrote. 

As the best possible ways of sort 

of escaping and dealing with this,  

Schopenhauer would put forth two primary methods: 

one, engaging in arts and philosophy, and two, the  

practicing of asceticism, traditionally being the 

deprivation of nearly all desire, self-indulgence,  

and everything past the bare minimum. In this 

later method, Schopenhauer felt that by denying  

the Will from being fed, so-to-speak, one would 

turn the Will against itself and overcome it.  

However, he also recognized the sheer 

difficulty of this for the majority of people  

and suggested the average person should 

simply make their best efforts towards  

letting go of ideals of happiness and pleasure, 

and rather, focus on the minimization of pain.  

Happiness in life, for Schopenhauer, is not 

a matter of joys and pleasures, but rather,  

the reduction and freedom from pain 

as much as possible. “The safest way  

of not being very miserable is not to 

expect to be very happy.” he wrote. 

Alternatively, engaging in arts and philosophy, 

in Schopenhauer’s mind, served as another, more  

accessible method. He felt that good art could 

provide a source of clarity into the nature and  

problems of being, without any of the illusion or 

drapery. And while engaging in this sort of art,  

one would have a transcendent-like experience 

that provides a relief and comfort from existence.  

As a result of this concept, 

Schopenhauer would end up being one  

of first thinkers to ever really introduce 

philosophical significance to the arts,  

and would eventually become known by 

many as the ‘artist’s philosopher.’ 

Of course, throughout his work in general, 

Schopenhauer makes large, often unprovable,  

and unknowable claims about the nature of reality 

and the value of existing within it. Some of which  

is validly constructed and worth considering, 

but some of which is likely not. Ultimately,  

any attempt to define and assess the side of 

reality beyond logic and reason through systematic  

logic and reason is perhaps paradoxical in way 

that is beyond repair. What precisely is the Will,  

where does it come from, where does it 

end, and how can we know or prove it?  

And in terms of Schopenhauer’s suggestion 

that one should turn against the Will  

through an ascetic process of self-denial, 

if all of life operates through the Will,  

to turn against it, would seem to merely be the 

Will turning against the Will for reasons that  

favor it. And there can be no turning against 

the Will if the Will is doing the turning.  

Alternatively, considering the view of Friedrich 

Nietzsche, a philosopher who notably followed in  

Schopenhauer’s footsteps, the endless cycle of 

desire and dissatisfaction caused by the Will  

is actually a good thing that we can use as fuel 

towards the process of self-overcoming and growth,  

which we can then obtain life’s meaning 

from. Of course, this is the more pleasant  

of the two interpretations, but it isn’t clear 

which is more apt and/or accurate, if either. 

Ultimately, Schopenhauer is another surprising, 

yet seemingly common story where a highly  

important thinker, artist, or writer, barely 

caught any recognition in their life, if at all,  

only to die and end up with their name in 

nearly every history book on the subject.  

One trait these stories do all 

seem to have in common, though,  

is a refusal to stop, a refusal to budge from 

pursuing and defending the world as one sees it.  

Schopenhauer never deviated from the 

philosophical system he created in his twenties  

and never stopped confidently working to build 

upon it and reinforce it throughout his life,  

despite the world seeming to suggest to 

him he should do otherwise. And yet, now,  

it is hugely significant to the world that he did 

exactly what he did. For some, his work might be  

bleak and disconcerting, but for others, his work, 

like all great works of dark, melancholic honesty,  

is comforting, relieving, and legitimizing. It 

reminds us that are not crazy, and our sadness  

and suffering are not unfounded, even when they 

may feel like it. We are merely put in a crazy,  

sad, violent reality with a mind and body 

that are often all in conspiracy against us.  

Because of this and many other reasons 

unmentioned, his work would go on to  

influence artists like Richard Wagner and Gustav 

Mahler; writers like Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy,  

and Samuel Beckett; and thinkers like Friedrich 

Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein,  

as well as many others, ultimately influencing 

the course of modern thinking, forever. 

Having been one of the first to properly 

and philosophically bring the value of life  

and the possibility of meaning into question, 

Schopenhauer helped locate the early budding  

problem of the growing agnostic world 

that philosophy would need to address.  

With humanity seemingly suspending 

further out into a void of meaning,  

his unyielding and fearless confrontation with 

the nature of existence, including all its  

horrors and miseries, revealed an opening of new 

possibilities towards finding answers from within.

[ah17hh]

My disappointments with LaVeyanism and the emergence of a new individual Satanism via /r/satanism

My disappointments with LaVeyanism and the emergence of a new individual Satanism

Let me start off by saying I don't think Anton LaVey was a bad person at all. I have a great degree of respect for him and his contributions to Satanism but after heavy consideration I have come to believe that many facets of his philosophy have become outdated and unfeasible.

My first main problem is the philosophical one. LaVeyan Satanism's main philosophical influences are Ayn Rand, Ragnar Redbeard (pen name of Arthur Desmond), and a little bit of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first edition of The Satanic Bible provides a whole bibliography of influences but these are the main ones. The Book of Satan pulls entire passages straight from Redbeard's Might is Right and LaVey himself went as far as to claim that Satanism is "just Ayn Rand's philosophy with ceremony and ritual added".

If you know anything about individualist philosophy you probably recognize the name Max Stirner. Stirner was the founder of individualist anarchism and was a major inspiration of nihilism and postmodernism. He is relevant to this discussion because Rand and Redbeard are both bad Stirner copycats. Stirner rejected any authority that could be held above his unique while the two ideological failures that tried and failed to emulate him were very much invested in upholding authority. Redbeard devotes a large portion of his writing to arguing that the English are superior to all other peoples, especially Jews, and that women are rightfully the property of men. Rand's main focus was defending the tyranny of corporate rule, aside from also being a racist and a rape apologist.

While this doesn't entirely discount what little nuggets of merit exist in their philosophy, why bother? Why not go right to the goods? A new Satanism based largely upon Stirner and Nietzsche as opposed to some clumsy imitators would be stronger and better than ever before.

This leads to another big problem with LaVeyan Satanism, which would be its dependence on Social Darwinism. For those of you who don't know, Social Darwinism is a now discredited doctrine which asserts that the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, which is that only the organisms which are best fit to a particular environment shall thrive in it, should be applied to human society, usually through the practice of eugenics and other equally disastrous ideas.

It seems strange that this set of ideas is part of LaVey's philosophy in the first place considering that his own Seventh Satanic Statement is "Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!". What makes any member of this wretched human species worthy to be the arbiter of life and death? That is all Nature's affair and She tends to respond rather harshly when humans try to involve themselves in Her affair.

Why delude ourselves with foolish dreams of abstract hierarchies when we can instead focus on things that truly matter? Things like creating art and the pursuit of knowledge or anything that makes the individual happy while not harming those around oneself? We may favor the just and curse the rotten based upon their actions, not the circumstances of their births.

The last point I want to make is that Satanism is stagnant in this day and age, largely due to the failures of the Church of Satan to evolve LaVey's philosophy in any meaningful way. This past decade has been occultism's time to shine in the mainstream and Satanism has been left in the dust despite this. To understand why this has happened we need to understand what splintered Satanism all the way back at the turn of the century. LaVey had died some years ago and the Church of Satan was under new management with Peter H. Gilmore taking over the High Priesthood.

For a number of reasons that would take an entire separate post to explain scores of Church members, including people close to LaVey, left and formed their own Satanist groups. This kind of thing had happened during LaVey's lifetime as well with Michael A. Aquino leaving to form the Temple of Set, but this new schism was a different beast entirely. Gilmore's response to the exodus was to effectively declare all the heretics "not true Satanists" and from that point forward the Church of Satan has maintained that its brand of Satanism is the only real Satanism, even though Satanism existed in different forms long before LaVey.

This outcome didn't do Satanism any favors and since then the Church of Satan has become, for all intents and purposes, a semi-exclusive club that occasionally performs rituals while smaller Satanist groups exist in complete irrelevance with the notable sole exception of The Satanic Temple, a troupe of progressivist political trolls who don't actually have anything to do with Satanism beyond its shock value. Satanism is stagnant and no number of recitations of passages from LaVey's bibliography will change that. Something new is needed for a rebirth of Satanic philosophy.

That something new could very well be a more anarchic Satanism. Still holding close ideas like The Nine Satanic Statements, The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth, and The Nine Satanic Sins but recognizing that in reality there are no rules, only suggestions. You can have a Satanic church or coven or cult if you want to, but who says you have to? Do whatever the Hell you want. Worship Cthulhu or Saturn or Tiamat or even all three if you really want to. Treat yourself as the first priority of your life as Nature has beared unto thee the whole world to enjoy the indulgences of. Make your own world, just don't make it boring. There's infinite possibilities and I'd love to hear what some other people think could be done. Thanks for reading and here's to LV A.S.

Submitted December 24, 2019 at 01:28PM by hollyjanefields via reddit https://ift.tt/2ZwnIIN