The last section of the last Chapter 13 Towards an ethical epistemology in Robert Romanyshy’s compelling book Wounded Researcher: Research with soul in mind (WR) is titled Amor Fati and is a one-page ending encapsulating his 386-page opus magnum.  I can see my dream amplification in the last Blog post A Dream, Association, Amplification as my attempt to understand the unfolding processes in Robert’s book – realizing the need to understand it as amor fati? I ended this previous blog writing this:

I have been at a blackboard all my life and recently was working with Kurt Kodel’s equations in the Blog post-Trump: A space-time traveler. Karl Marx’s mathematical transformation problem has been an interest since graduate school. And this dream’s blackboard reminds me of teaching at the University Of International Business and Economics (UIBE) (1988-1991) through the Trainmen Square Massacre and its aftermath. I can remember wondering why the PRC would allow me to teach participation management principles (democracy) in a Communist State. The dynamics of this question are still with me as I study the forces in globalization. The logic like the end of history and the last man standing is on the blackboard but it has an unclear final mathematical element that my colleague Leo offers to re-state as I and several team members attentively listen. From my dissertation on this dream amplification, Romanyshyn makes this important observation, “Facing the work, one accepts that one has been called into the work through one’s complexes for the sake of becoming the agent of the work itself, accepting its imperfections and incompleteness, and, resting in that place one knows that to the best of his or her abilities, one has been faithful to the dialogue with others for whom the work has been done” (344).

The real challenge at the center of being a wounded researcher and being “called into the work through one’s complexes” is to understand one’s personal complex involved in the research project. In trying to get this completed and sent, I turned to another WR chapter, started to re-read it, and then realized that it seemed I was experiencing the holographic nature of Romanyshyn’s book. A project exploring this concept is going to take more space-time – a wounded researcher’s question, “Is the Soul holographic, and what would be its mathematics?” I then posted Michael Talbot’s interview on the Holographic Universe and the mathematics of the Fourier Transformation, of all things, presented on a blackboard.

I realized I needed to expand Romanyshyn’s one-page section, Amor Fait. What is the deep of this concept?  I started with this Wikipedia entry: “Amor Fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as ‘love of fate’ or ‘love of one’s fate. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least,  necessary, in that they are among the facts of one’s life and existence, so they are always necessarily there whether one likes them or not. Moreover, amor fati is characterized by an acceptance of the events or situations that occur in one’s life. This acceptance does not necessarily preclude an attempt at change or improvement, but rather, it can be seen to be along the lines of what Friedrich Nietzsche means by the concept of eternal recurrence: a sense of contentment with one’s life and an acceptance of it, such that one could live exactly the same life, in all its minute details, over and over for all eternity.”

This got me started but it quickly took me down rabbit holes reading other materials. The amor fati concept is used repeatedly in Nietzsche’s writings and is representative of the general outlook on life that he articulates in section 276 of The Gay Science: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”  It is important to note that Nietzsche in this context refers to the “Yes-sayer”, not in a political or social sense, but as a person who is capable of uncompromising acceptance of reality per se. Quotation from “Why I Am So Clever” in Ecce Homo, section 10.

I quickly realized that I needed to augment my learning strategy of reading Nietzsche passages from Wikipedia to seeing if Youtube would get me through the challenging task of understanding the core of Nietzsche’s thought. I was pleasantly surprised in finding several Youtube lectures providing insights into Nietzsche and Romanyshyn’s use of Amor fati as a principle underpinning both approaches to life. These unfolded in this order and each adds a different view to my question: How do Nietzsche’s and Romanyshny’s projects overlap and how are they contributing to my project?  I worked through several Youtube clips Nietzsche in 12 minutes, in 50 minutes, in 90 minutes, all interesting presentations. Nietzsche In Twelve Minutes  give a quick overview of his thought.

However, what seemed to offer a deep dive into amor fait was the clip 45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil.  I was intrigued by Professor Jordan Peterson’s discussion of a single paragraph from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. I have tracked it with time marks quoting, and paraphrasing Peterson’s presentation. I began to see how Romanyshyn and Nietzsche’s projects were similar – they both were writing with soul in mind and their “ability to layer meaning upon meaning in a few sentences requires an extreme intensity of thought” (Peterson). I will transcribe and comment 0n Jordan’s lecture and on some of Romanyshyn’s similarities. I will continue blogging about this as as my project unfolds.

I started this blog on 11.03.2016 and am finishing it on 11.11.2016 after being in shock for 24 hours after Trump was elected President. I was told by a friend to take a breath – it took 11,520 breaths, after Trump was elected for me to begin my recovering process. The ending of Peterson’s analysis, I recently re-listening to, startled me – it recalls the warning presented in the Blog Post Trickster Donald Trump that Trump may now be a Cyclopes – an omen to be on guard to. The 45 minutes ends at 39:50 suggesting that the “One-eyed monster, the Cyclopes want to be the dominate one. He organizes a structure and appears at the top of the pyramid in control. I am now becoming aware that this is being written not only about me but all of us, also about Donald Trump now at the top of our collective pyramid USA. What is he up to? The processes Peterson presents for you and I is one thing but to see that Trump as the US President is probably just now stumbling into this challenge, is concerning to say the least. We simple do not know what he is up to.

Jordan B Peterson 45 minutes on a single paragraph of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Beyond Good & Evil Section 1 Prejudice of Philosophers

1:00 All great authors collect unconscious patterns from his or her interactions in the world, giving them an initial formulation, and the patterns can be deep, multilevel, and the initial formulations are translated into ideas not so many ideas but into the seeds of future ideas. And the more poetic the author happens to be, the more his or her writings contain these seeds of future ideas. This is the quality of thought of the “romantics”. This paragraph illustrates Nietzsche’s process of thinking.

4:00 Why does it matter to bother with this book at all. Nietzsche is interested in the issue of “values”. The problem of value is not what the world is made of, or even how the world functions, which are more scientific questions, it is how you should conduct yourself in the world, how should you act. And people act toward aims in a sense because we are moving from one point to another, we are moving toward things that we want, toward our desires. We are guided by our values but by the structure of how those values are related to one another.

4:45 So, for example, if you have a roomful of people, a roomful of children. A congress is full of elected representatives. They are active children and at some point, they may choose to play a game or organize together to accomplish an aim and this is a micro-society with rules of the game. We do this socially because we have to get along with others and we also do this psychologically and together this is sort of a dance. As I am interacting with other people, the demands of the group are such that one organizes his own demands such that they take into consideration the others’ structure. We are constantly observing these social processes and using this in organizing our own psychological structure in order to get along and together accomplish our goals. This is a dynamic inter-actional dance processing by which the society in self-organizing and used by the individual psyche self-organizing to fit in. This is the processes that Nietzsche is presenting in this paragraph.

6:00 What’s the utility of this dance? We as individuals have to arrange our desires and values so they are acceptable to everyone else. If we do not want to run afoul of our own desires and values, one has to organize them. Some are short, medium, or long term and we do not want them getting in the way of each other. Example of lover and wife given – tell me we have not been here. The purpose of thinking this through it to be able to move forward in a world without getting killed or killing. So, reading philosophy like Nietzsche’s is that it can help us think these things through and avoid wars – individual and collective. Nietzsche is one in a billion thinkers so, why not get him on Trump’s team.

10:00 “It has gradually become clear to me, what every great philosophy up to now has consisted of, namely the confession of its originator and species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Here the difference between being a “rational being” and a “living being” is differentiated.  Nietzsche says that “truth serves life” which is different than saying “truth is an accurate representation of the world”. Here Nietzsche’s meta-physics philosophy idea is outlined. One is working at attempting to arrange one’s systems of values that make sense and will assist one in plotting the journey through life. In doing this one is writing one’s autobiography, one is like writing a story, one is writing with soul in mind, and one is a Romanyshyn wounded researcher in motion.

16:55 “A species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography…” we as a species value one another because we engage and share with one another our biographical selves – “you tell me your story and I tell you my story” and this is important because our stories help each of us address the trials of life we encounter. If we can learn, here we can say deeply empathize with each other, we as a civilization will advance more effectively and efficiently. Nietzsche’s point is that this activity is involuntary and unconscious in humans and his philosophy is to make this important human activity conscious, it is the primary task of the Wounded Researcher – understanding the complexes in a research project – in a new administration. “People have a built in value not to question what one is engaged in.” The introduction of the idea that you should analyze whatever you are engaged in when you are reading, comes as un-welcomed news to a new student having to detach him/herself and think about what one is doing.” “It is one of the things within which thought operates, rather than one of the things on which thought operates.”

19:55 The ultimate question in life is to what is one’s life aimed? We as a species are 3.5 billion years old. What is inside you – it is all of these years rolled into you. God only knows. Who cares, you care – everything is a manifestation of your ethic. CG Jung was a student of Nietzsche and surrounds his study about the individual story. All of this is inside us and our task is to understand this. Everything good or evil in the world is a consequence of your value system. This determines how one moves through life. We become more aware of this as we move closer to death. Now his is hitting close to me at 72.

24:00 The moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the total plant is always grown. One cannot help reveal this plant. How Hitler died story – alters us to what some are not saying is unfolding for Trump.

26:00 What morally is a person up to? What is the person up to? What does it mean that a person is aiming at something? I do not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father of philosophy but that another impulse has made use of knowledge and mistaken knowledge as an instrument. Nietzsche questions the impulse to a knowledge issue. Here the deconstructionist issue is analyzed – that what the philosopher is really up to in writing is the impulse to power. Whatever you are telling me to dominate me regardless of what it is you claim to be doing. The problem is that it implies the only value people have is to dominate. This could be the case and in some, it likely is the case. But one should not make this the highest aim in life. (Aziz’s work) The idea of the will to power has to be further examined. What does Nietzsche mean by the will to power?

31:00 Marx and materialism are addressed here and this needs to be further addressed. (Holt’s work)

32:00 People working for the system, like government agencies and universities:  in the case of these men, scholars, there may be a quest for knowledge. Like a clock when wound up works industrially to the end. (Dangerous Knowledge Theme) This issue may be a will to knowledge but we can not say that it is the top value. There is another web of values lurking in the background. This is deeper than first thought.

35:00 What is a book look like. Nietzsche’s book Good and evil is a bomb, every sentence explodes with deeper meaning.

36:00 There are fundamental impulses in human beings. People do have impulses. How do they play themselves out in our life? There is a place where these impulses live. They do live. This was so cool, as Peterson is describing these many impulses, demons, taking one over, I saw them operating in life just then. His description was just then working its magic on me!

39:50 One-eyed monster, a Cyclops wants to be the dominant one – only I can solve our problems Trump has said. The Cyclops organizes the structure and appears at its top to control it – today 11/10/2016 begins Trump’s transition to the Presidency of the United States, as worries of fascism abound. I was hoping we did not have to witness this unfold with someone at the top of Western Civilization’s leading nation but this is now our fate! This of course is now the challenge to every one of us – deep thinking about values. We now have the ultimate reality show and we all are players. This Nietzsche paragraph is our World’s collective challenge. I feel I am slipping back into shock. Help! Where are you Shrek?

I will end this Blog entry with this broad overview on  Nietzsche and ‘Amor Fati’.

Oh Shrek, there you are! Where is your other eye? How do we get us out of here?
We know Trump lies, does he also wears women’s underwear? Hallelujah!

Steven.Scherling@gmail.com