Daemon as Deus Deceptor

[SM Kovalinsky]

(Have to post this, pre-Martin weekend. Andrew is delirious with anticipation of meeting Hurlyburly. Rosh, I told you I would put it up, and sorry you cannot reach me on Yahoo Chat; still broken.)

To continue speaking on the parallels between the dyad and philosophy: To begin: Cartesian philosophy: Hyperbolic doubt ( or as Berkeley would term it, systematic doubt) is the deliberate doubting of the empirical realm. In Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes decides he will be in dialogue with himself. His consciousness is all: cogito ergo sum. God is presupposed to be deus deceptor. Things may be wholly different from what they seem. The Daemon may be ensnaring us as well, so that the empirical realm is a dumb-show. Schopenhauer called life " a moving picture book" based on a groundless and all encompassing will ( this would be the IMax based on the Superdaemon, if one draws Peakian parallels , as do I). This is the most counter-intuitive of all of Tony's premises, somehow due to the quantum explanations. Paradoxically, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and Schopenhaur's "book" were less so. ( At least in my own experience).
Heidegger's Dasein: We are thrown into "Being-there". Is is only accident that Descartes dreamt of a wind whirling him around, and he "cried out for Archimedes"? I think not; he knew he was being "ventured", as Heidegger terms it. There are striking parallels between Holderlin, I think, and the idea of the "venture" being Daemonic "He is venturing" as in Heidegger's Das Man (The One, "this man who I am" very much the Eidolon. *Must work this in for Anthony)---( one might say Kierkegaard's either/or is this "venture". Jaspers wrote to my thinking the best work on Kierkegaard, and his fellow existentialist, Nietzsche. "Existentialism is a humanism" said Satre. Not so to K and N! They are pure daemon, not eidolonic, as humanism is. Have to run now, more philosophical musings later. . ..

[SM Kovalinsky]

Afterthoughts: The above is posted presupposing certain connections. The problem is my seeing them too clearly, and for too long, so I apologize if it is "muddy". Heidegger's Dasein is in many ways more subtle than the Cogito: More passive. Rather than, cogito erog sum"I think, therefore I am", there is the passive, "I am thrown into this world, I am ventured". Holderliin's says, delicately, "But where the danger is, lies also the fostering power": Where the Eidolon is lost, is also the Daemon's saving power: This is how I first read Tony Peake's Cheating the Ferryman. To me, his book, The Daemon: A Guide to your Extraordinary Secret Self might be subtitled with Holderlin's phrase (The Daemon: Where the Danger is, Lies Also the Fostering Power). "Freedom toward Death": Heidegger's term. Life, then, was the deus deceptor for him. "Freedom toward the Daemon": a very similar concept. And Descartes, in the end, concluded, But God is no deceiver.