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SELECTIVE BREEDING AND THE BIRTH OF PHILOSOPHY is the dissertation of Costin Alamariu.
Below are some of my favorite quotes primarily from the introduction, as to include from whole book will be a long thread.
You must read this book if interested the Greks and philosophy.
Below are some of my favorite quotes primarily from the introduction, as to include from whole book will be a long thread.
You must read this book if interested the Greks and philosophy.
“Plato and many others of the time therefore concealed much: because they had to. In contrast to later thinkers, they were aware of the importance of what they were concealing. They thought this was an important matter. 1/2
They thought the problem of biology, to put it in our words, would never be forgotten. The problem is they concealed too well. And so eventually the truth about the meaning of “nature” really was obscured.” 2/2 -Alamariu
“The failure of God’s plan for Adam, and thereafter the debacles of the generations following Adam that led to the flood, all had to do with matters of sexual transgression or of misbreeding.” -Alamariu
“Social liberals and feminists make the same mistake. They assume the problem is that men desire patriarchy and ownership over the wife and family, that men desire dominion over wife and children. 1/2
They do not see these are, in part, methods some civilizations resorted to in order to induce men to accept the responsibilities of father and husband.” 2/2 -Alamariu
“Men deprived of patriarchy have no reason to accept duty or responsibility, nor the loss of freedom that goes with family life.” -Alamariu
“The problem, as social liberals and feminists are finding out, isn’t that men seek by nature or education to dominate wives or children, but that men simply don’t care.” -Alamariu
“Men seek status above all because it is attractive to women and results in intercourse or breeding—in fact, in social animals, where status and hierarchy clearly exists, status serves precisely this purpose.” -Alamariu
“But one need not speculate about how the Church exerted its power throughout medieval Europe, which was precisely through its control over marriage. It is through its power to carry out marriages […], that the priesthood was able to exert such temporal power.” -Alamariu
“The Church disapproved of arranged marriages and in most of Europe it forbad cousin marriage. […] the Church entirely did away with the types of cousin marriage that would allow for the perpetuation of tribes or clans.” -Alamariu
“For Nietzsche, Christianity laid the groundwork for the calamity of modern liberalism, modern democracy, and modern socialism, which threatened to destroy, maybe permanently, not only the possibility of philosophy, but of life in the full sense of the word.” -Alamariu
“I offer, I believe, the first comprehensive account for Plato’s eugenic teaching. It is a view, in the end, not so different from Socrates’ other student Critias, who wrote a treatise on the Spartan constitution and intuited the meaning of it as a project for the breeding of a supreme biological specimen.” -Alamariu
“Many ancient traditions assumed that human pairings are not, or should not be, random: they assumed, unconsciously or not, the hereditary nature of various qualities, and therefore assumed that great care must go into matchmaking.” -Alamariu
“The pursuit of excellence, the desire to be proven the best compared to all other men, is the foundation of all of Greek culture.”
“Philosophers and tyrants were both perceived by the cities of the time as kindred criminal spirits.” -Alamariu
“Philosophers and tyrants were both perceived by the cities of the time as kindred criminal spirits.” -Alamariu
“When the idea of nature first emerged, it did so in opposition to convention or ‘custom.’ Cows graze, wolves hunt by nature; but different tribes of men deal differently with the dead—cremation, burial, etc.—by custom or convention.” -Alamariu
“The question of what was ‘by nature’ or ‘by convention’ animated much of Greek intellectual life, and had important political meaning, for example, with the aristocratic party generally favoring the side of nature, and the democratic generally favoring the side of convention.”
“As we will see, all of the earliest mentions of nature, and certainly all the elaborations of the idea of nature, are entirely biological, and have to do with the physical body, with biological “vitality,” and especially with blood or, again, breeding, eugenics, and heredity.”CA
“On closer reading, Socrates, or rather Plato, modifies it only with respect to tactics. Many other clues led me to believe that the true teaching of Plato is the ‘tyrannical’ teaching of Callicles just with makeup on” -Alamariu
“Both Plato and Nietzsche were fundamentally motivated by the same thing, the defense of the freedom of thought and of the possibility of philosophy, and therefore, at bottom, the preservation of nature, nature in the original, Pindaric sense, nature as blood and breeding.” -CA
“The ‘radicalization’ of youth is happening not because of neonazi indoctrination, nor because of Russian plots, but because of the inability of our intellectual establishment, right or left, to provide a fair and convincing education to young people.” -Alamariu
“This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders[…] come upon the teaching of nature” -Alamariu
“The claims I try to elaborate here are the following: a) that the Greek world is, from as early as we can tell, stratified into a conquering and a conquered people, an aristocratic element and a “banausic” or serf-like element.” -Alamariu
“And that the conquering or aristocratic caste already contains, from the beginning, certain peculiar institutions that I will later show to bear directly on the problem of tyranny and philosophy—in particular the institution of an independent warrior class composed of youths;”CA
“that these two features of Greek life, namely the top-down imposition of order by a conquering elite and the separate and independent status of the warrior class, is likely what allows for a principle different from the fundamental democracy[…] to emerge,” -Alamariu
“that this principle consists, not in the preservation of a people or a collective, but in the struggle for individual superiority, understood as a matter of the supremacy of one’s ‘blood,’ with direct analogy to the animal world, and which is manifested through physical supremacy, vitality, and battle prowess, and in the consequent acquisition of an ‘undying fame.’” -Alamariu
“It is this principle of aristocratic life or aristocratic morality, as understood in the most primitive and even barbaric sense, that Nietzsche believes is the origin of philosophy.” -Alamariu
Respect for the REAL philosophers out there.
Using philosophy for its INTENDED purpose: to become TYRANT
Using philosophy for its INTENDED purpose: to become TYRANT
“In particular the two essential qualities mentioned—political ability or intelligence, and military courage—could be directly translated as phronesis and andreia, the two primal qualities of the Greek aristocrat in Homer or Pindar: the ability to give good counsel in assembly, and manliness or prowess in battle.” -Alamariu
“Phusis exists as a standard apart even from the divine, and outside the power of the divine; nature exists apart from both the divine and from convention and could be argued to be superior in power even to the divine.” -Alamariu
“Indeed, it has been speculated that the initial quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is a quarrel between nature and convention in embryo, so to speak. Agamemnon holds the royal scepter, indicating conventional and ancestral ancestral title to rule; but in challenging him Achilles, recognized by all to be the stronger and more excellent hero, swears an oath on a scepter of nature, a sprouting tree branch—this is incidentally the second and only instance of a word with the same root as phusis in the whole of Homer.” -Alamariu
Full review here:
“Alamariu gives an account of the ancient Greks that you won’t get from academia and that will give it both credibility and authority.
He pulls from a multitude of sources from Pindar and Plato to Burckhardt, Strauss, and Nietzsche”
resavager.com/p/selective-br…
“Alamariu gives an account of the ancient Greks that you won’t get from academia and that will give it both credibility and authority.
He pulls from a multitude of sources from Pindar and Plato to Burckhardt, Strauss, and Nietzsche”
resavager.com/p/selective-br…
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