Four of the peoples in Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece have remained in my memory.
The Lilliputians, of course, who, though tiny, can overcome a giant Gulliver by sheer force of numbers and ropes.
The heady and arrogant Laputans on their flying rock in the sky, blocking out the sunlight of the Balnibarbi.
The Brobdingnagians, whose laws can have no more words in them than the twenty-two letters in their alphabet.
And the Houyhnhnm --pronounced whinnim--, those rational horse-creatures who have to contain the savage Yahoos --aka humans. And who, though recognizing Gulliver as a superior kind of Yahoo, expel him nonetheless, in case he encourage more of his kind to invade their land and threaten them with their dirt and beastliness.
I deny any connection between these fictional groups and any non-fictional groups of people I regularly write about here on Ex Cathedra.
(No Houyhnhnm was harmed in the making of this blog.)
The Lilliputians, of course, who, though tiny, can overcome a giant Gulliver by sheer force of numbers and ropes.
The heady and arrogant Laputans on their flying rock in the sky, blocking out the sunlight of the Balnibarbi.
The Brobdingnagians, whose laws can have no more words in them than the twenty-two letters in their alphabet.
And the Houyhnhnm --pronounced whinnim--, those rational horse-creatures who have to contain the savage Yahoos --aka humans. And who, though recognizing Gulliver as a superior kind of Yahoo, expel him nonetheless, in case he encourage more of his kind to invade their land and threaten them with their dirt and beastliness.
I deny any connection between these fictional groups and any non-fictional groups of people I regularly write about here on Ex Cathedra.
(No Houyhnhnm was harmed in the making of this blog.)
5 comments:
Don't the houyhnhnms or Amalekites expel Gulliver not despite his having logos whereas the houyhnhms Yahoos have been deprived or logos but precisely because he has logos?
Among the defects in the houyhnhms is that they lack the virtue courage, and refuse to reveal the 22 letters or greater mysteries to their selfs, and they do not love (no passion, no attachment cf buddhist stoic et al inability to attach, cathect [even in the NT "passsion" pathê is not yet a favourably valued event cf the Passion of Christ). The 'benevolence' and 'friendship' that Swift proposes are their principal virtues are calculations upon sameness.
The houyhnhms conveniently project all evils onto their Yahoos, who are then hated, though they perform and take the karmic blame for an oats milk and hay eucharist festival for a houyhnhms 'victor' who runs through the paces set for him. (The houyhnhms forbid recognition of the planets, sacraments, except for the moon [no doubt as if the dark sun] and the sun, and eclipses.)
In order to perpetuate their obscurantism, the houyhnhnms must expel Gulliver in fear that he may reveal to the Yahoos or chandalas their status as sons of the earth or dark sun sc they are the aboriginal inhabitants though the 'violent hatred' of the houyhnhnms for the yahoos is as if proof that they are not the aborigines on grounds that their odiousness would have caused the houyhnhnms to exterminate them, since evil and odiousness are unnecessary. As if abolition of the ego follows from Pascal's revelation "the ego is odious" -- as if the self can be composed by a non-ego. Hey at most the result would be a non-self, which surely would obviously be not worth attaching to thus nekkhamma or non-upadana happens logically.
The houyhnhnms mention only that they fear Gulliver would lead the other yahoos in cattle rustling, but obviously a regime over the houyhnhnms is possible -- by yahoos who don't project evil onto some nefarious other and who use ratios or logoi as a stairway to comprehensive truth.
The houyhnhnm who rules Gulliver "agree[s] entirely with the sentiments of Socreates, as Plato delilvers them" -- sc but not with the logoi of Socrates as Plato midwives them into the ejecta, us, the natura naturata.
P.S. Having heard the pressure of Nietzsche, Buddhists tend to compose a foreground for their religion in terms of therapy of attachment.
The new Buddha no longer counsels nekkhamma, since to say that a mother ought not to cathect to her child would psychically and bodily destroy the child -- the result is FTT, failure to thrive; the infant dies.
Accordingly, the Buddha now counsels us to not "cling" -- for instance, when a child grows up and must move away, the parent must let go. And so on for all sorts of situations where a good person or good situation cannot be maintain'd and one must 'let go.'
Or we are to attach only to worthwhile stuff, and not to gold and jewels and money and worldly prestige.
But this re-interpretation removes the basic therapy that the Buddha proposed, namely non-attachment as the solution for heartache. The mother who does not "cling" and who "lets go" of her children experiences tremendous heartache. The more she loves and cathects, bonds, etc, the greater her heartache, the more beautiful her heartache. Heartache is suffering.
The Buddha as therapist of attachment -- congratulating proper attachment to worthwhile objects, and criticizing unworthy attachment -- does not solve the problem of existence. When one is strong enough, one does not need this problem solved. "Tragedy" isn't a "problem," Nietzsche observes. Jesus Christ's Passion in attachment to mankind isn't a "problem" for Bach in the St Matthew Passion.
If healthy, strong, enobling attachment is the proper goal of life, the one ought to consider Nietzsche directly, rather than look to the Buddha's doctrine of non-attachment as though it's a path to the proper sort of attachment, as though "nirvana" is a term for cathexis in tragic real life circumstances.
Probably Buddhists should just have tough'd it out, and exterted the strength to admit that they offer a spiriting-out-of-the-world spirituality for those who aren't strong enough to live and attach, and for whom benevolence means instructing others in the advantages of non-attachment -- that is, real non-attachment, not strong passionate attachment to the proper objects, the persons and concerns that are most worthy of our attachment.
There are lots of potential Buddhists among those who are exhausted (nirvana'd) and ready to agree that life is too difficult, not to be celebrated, etc.
Schopenhauer: "if you consider life a business enterprise, it is obviously a business enterprise that doesn't earn enough to pay its costs. Nietzsche: "then don't live. problem solved. Don't build a culture of structures upon the earth that says life isn't worth living.
Freud is rather a Gulliverian Yahoo -- attentive to excretory function, to repression and the necessity rationale for repression, also to sublimation. ...
The houyhnhnms don't say the thing which is not (ch. iv), but forbearing from falsehood is not the same as revealing the object of truth.
Their simplisticness about language for 'information about facts' reminds somewhat of Jesus' advice to give a double yes and a double no (Matt 5:37), and not to bring into language yhwh or theistic-satisfaction God or even the transcendence mechanisms of heaven, earth and the city of the great king (vv. 33ff).
But the more versatile language of truth or revelation used by European Yahoos enables their ratios to place them in government over the houyhnhnms, although perhaps who is exploiting whom isn't easily discover'd. ... The Amalekite arrangement of front and back boutiques kept hermetically separate is in many ways highly advantageous for obscurantism, but the European Yahoos' prestidigitation of white into black and v.v. (e.g. by one of the S.J.'s rules for thinking in the church, that true 'white' and true 'black' are determined not by appearance but by institutional power) is evidently more congruent with the subjective presentation of the real object.
The houyhnhnms' presentation of 'black' and 'white' in separate theses stalls their truth system because they cannot allow that houyhnhnm truth develops out of its opposite in yahoo truth. For after all the name houyhnhnm is not so unlike the name yahoo. Yahoo reminds of yhwh, who brings Moses' self shadow unto him and induces Zipporah to do circumcision ?sc into _the_ world.
By rescramblings and letter invertings, a houyhnhnm is perhaps a dualist yohu [the aleph has been wised up into an ayin] overlaid by Persian Pharisee noise (js1995 HMWN cf vizier js2001) with a suggestion of the inauthentic 'they' as reveal'd by Heidegger (HMWN HMN js1994)
yahoo
yohu
ohhnm Ts ouw
European yahoos' more honest confession that one is a liar and sinner permits a truer facility with truth. Christians confess, even emphasize, that divine revelation and sacred scripture is brought by liars and sinners. Houyhnhnms present a set of supposedly accurate facts, and feign that that is the whole truth. "Grey"? Who ever heard of the colour grey, or realities that become and change. (Buddha declares that any reality that becomes and passes away isn't real. Only the permanent is real. And what's permanent from the perspective of the unthematic observer? Nothingness. But nothingness changes too, doesn't it? And the unthematic observer.)
A European yahoo can say "poetically [in poetry, making, fiction] man dwells." Swift proposes that "in poetry" the Houyhnhnms "excel all other mortals." Evidently not in themes of man's greatness and misery, say, but in "the justness of their similes [imitations], and the minuteness, as well as exactness of their descriptions" they "are indeed inimitable."
The themes are "notions[sewings] of friendship and benevolence" (we read later that "friends and relations express[] neither joy nor grief" at a houyhnhm's death) and "the praises of those who were victors in races, and other bodily exercises."
Plato's Socrates perhaps would approve of the lack of tragedy in their poetics, but their lack of irony and comedy might not be welcome to him. ... Except for the lack of any hymns to the Gods, the houyhnhnm country reminds of Socrates' "healthy city" which Glaucon value ore reveals as a city of sows (cf js5483 SWS horse).
The houyhnhnms don't say the thing which is not (ch. iv), but forbearing from falsehood is not the same as revealing the object of truth.
Their simplisticness about language for 'information about facts' reminds somewhat of Jesus' advice to give a double yes and a double no (Matt 5:37), and not to bring into language yhwh or theistic-satisfaction God or even the transcendence mechanisms of heaven, earth and the city of the great king (vv. 33ff).
But the more versatile language of truth or revelation used by European Yahoos enables their ratios to place them in government over the houyhnhnms, although perhaps who is exploiting whom isn't easily discover'd. ... The Amalekite arrangement of front and back boutiques kept hermetically separate is in many ways highly advantageous for obscurantism, but the European Yahoos' prestidigitation of white into black and v.v. (e.g. by one of the S.J.'s rules for thinking in the church, that true 'white' and true 'black' are determined not by appearance but by institutional power) is evidently more congruent with the subjective presentation of the real object.
The houyhnhnms' presentation of 'black' and 'white' in separate theses stalls their truth system because they cannot allow that houyhnhnm truth develops out of its opposite in yahoo truth. For after all the name houyhnhnm is not so unlike the name yahoo. Yahoo reminds of yhwh, who brings Moses' self shadow unto him and induces Zipporah to do circumcision ?sc into _the_ world.
By rescramblings and letter invertings, a houyhnhnm is perhaps a dualist yohu [the aleph has been wised up into an ayin] overlaid by Persian Pharisee noise (js1995 HMWN cf vizier js2001) with a suggestion of the inauthentic 'they' as reveal'd by Heidegger (HMWN HMN js1994).
European yahoos' more honest confession that one is a liar and sinner permits a truer facility with truth. Christians confess, even emphasize, that divine revelation and sacred scripture is brought by liars and sinners. Houyhnhnms present a set of supposedly accurate facts, and feign that that is the whole truth. "Grey"? Who ever heard of the colour grey, or realities that become and change. (Buddha declares that any reality that becomes and passes away isn't real. Only the permanent is real. And what's permanent from the perspective of the unthematic observer? Nothingness. But nothingness changes too, doesn't it? And the unthematic observer.)
A European yahoo can say "poetically [in poetry, making, fiction] man dwells." Swift proposes that "in poetry" the Houyhnhnms "excel all other mortals." Evidently not in themes of man's greatness and misery, say, but in "the justness of their similes [imitations], and the minuteness, as well as exactness of their descriptions" they "are indeed inimitable."
The themes are "notions[sewings] of friendship and benevolence" (we read later that "friends and relations express[] neither joy nor grief" at a houyhnhm's death) and "the praises of those who were victors in races, and other bodily exercises."
Plato's Socrates perhaps would approve of the lack of tragedy in their poetics, but their lack of irony and comedy might not be welcome to him. ... Except for the lack of any hymns to the Gods, the houyhnhnm country reminds of Socrates' "healthy city" which Glaucon value ore reveals as a city of sows (cf js5483 SWS horse).
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