Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall. Its contribution to a 'sociology of knowledge' must often carry us far into the lugubrious regions of malice and the lie. If you wish to introduce a topic or keyterm or explore one, select the ADD button below, or read through the conversations already posted to this list by selecting the title of the note. In this last section we circle back to the fundamental problem of self and reality, to look at the cultural evidence of the acetic ideal, to again show how that life-negation can follow both the Apollinian and the Dionysian because both negate the self. The ancient belief that life was suffering, given the fact that it was believed the soul was trapped into the body, was an ancient belief found in Greece and India.
Life is suffering, reality is maya.
The goal is to get beyond suffering, consequently, to get beyond life. The problem is that there is a loss of life because of the failure of adaption, given that if one idealizes otherworldliness one tends to not adequately prepare to live this life. The consequence would inevitably be alienation from the world and from community. It could not do anything else. After having been thrown into a world into which he was never supposed to have been born, he is literally cast out into hostile nature.