The Noble Lie Revisited with Jason Reza Jorjani (Mishlove interview)

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

So this may be my favorite Mishlove interview yet (no offense to BK), for a variety of reasons. I started watching a lot of interviews with Jorjani, a bunch on Mishlove and a few elsewhere, for the following reason - he is extremely well-versed in all philosophical schools, including many thinkers whom I admire, and a lot of other topics such as history, anthropology, politics, etc. He is articulate, insightful and provocative. But I find myself disagreeing with nearly all of his philosophical and metaphysical conclusions, and certainly his views about what humanity should be aiming for and how to go about accomplishing those aims.

I am trying to figure out why that is. What are the basic axioms that he or I are getting wrong, if any? Why does he follow the same philosphical lines of thinking I follow but end up somewhere completely different? I have a few ideas now, but I will wait to flesh those out later. I just wanted to post the video for now. The discussion which starts around the 45 min mark is especially fascinating and becomes emotional to the extent that Mishlove's remarks at the end nearly brought a tear to me eye. That being said, I still feel Jorjani is fundamentally off with his conclusions in some way. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxsz6igKMds&t=1816s

"Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD, is a philosopher and author of Prometheus and Atlas, World State of Emergency, Lovers of Sophia, Novel Folklore: The Blind Owl of Sadegh Hedayat, and Iranian Leviathan: A Monumental History of Mithra's Abode. Here he reviews the history of philosophical arguments relating to either the necessity or appropriateness of truth distortions. The discussion includes the thoughts of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, William James, and Leo Strauss. Jorjani defends the application of the noble lie in some circumstances, and points out how it has been despicably abused in others. The conversation concludes with a pointed review of Jorjani's own involvement with the Iranian renaissance movement and the alt-right. Many viewers will know that Jason Reza Jorjani has suffered from libel and persecution as a result of his, generally misunderstood, political views. He is a brilliant scholar who has now been unfairly disgraced and is forced to fight a legal battle, while continuing his research and writing, without any regular employment."

[Ben Iscatus]

What occurred to me was that Jorjani does not seem to appreciate or promulgate virtues like compassion, forgiveness and love.  

[Dana Lomas]

Well, it would appear that as of last October Mishlove and Jorjani have had a falling out over political differences expressed in a video by JM, since described and decried on JJ's FB page as a "paternalistic and insulting hit piece" that came as an ambush out of the blue. So it seems you're not the only one feeling that JJ is fundamentally 'off' with his conclusions, although perhaps for different reasons, and further interviews like this one have become yet more collateral damage. Mind you, JM has also taken his share of flack in the fallout from the falling out.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

I was trying to find that falling out video before, do you have a link?

I definitely don't agree with his political conclusions, but yes I was more referring to his metaphysical conclusions. He ends up in the 'postmodern' "there is no objective reality" and "all meta-narratives are false" and useful fictions at best camp. So he would say something like objective idealism and Christian philosophy/theology are Noble Lies, whereas I believe it is much deeper and profound than that. 

[Dana Lomas]

Further Reflections on My Friend Jason Reza Jorjani  (edit: 'ex-friend'?)

[Claudio Chianese]

I would hardly believe Mishlove doing a "paternalistic and insulting hit piece" on anyone. He's pretty much the nicest person I ever saw on youtube. As for JJ, his ideas are very complex and he draws on a very wide philosophical background, going from Plato to Derrida, from esoteric traditionalism to italian futurism. Reading something from him left me with the impression that he's upon something interesting, but there is just too much complexity he doesn't really address. He's definitely not an analytical philosopher like BK, but nevertheless strikes me a powerful mind.

[Dana Lomas]

Well just quoting JJ's own words, so clearly they are highly subjective. Due to its provocative and possibly trigger-effect content, I've not linked to his contextual response on his facebook to JM's 'refjections', or the further incendiary response on the 'Prometheism' FB page he is apparently associated with. 

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"As for JJ, his ideas are very complex and he draws on a very wide philosophical background, going from Plato to Derrida, from esoteric traditionalism to italian futurism. Reading something from him left me with the impression that he's upon something interesting."

Yeah he is definitely a complex thinker with an impressive knowledge of philosophy and religion, that much is clear to me from his interviews. I also felt he was upon something interesting, as is often how I feel with various original 'post-modern' thinkers.  Most of them cannot come close to the penetrating insight of someone like Nietzsche (and to be fair that is too high of a standard to set), but they are continuing his tradition of devastating critiques of modernism and institutionalized belief systems. I liked the comparison JJ made between Nietzsche and William James, and how "the will to Truth always becoming the will to power" is another way of expressing pragmatic philosophy, i.e. the best criterion for "Truth" is what works to continually affirm being and becoming. 

On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 at 11:12:06 AM UTC-5 Claudio Chianese wrote:

[Santeri Satama]

Wiki: "Some of the misconceptions of the will to power, including Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, arise from overlooking Nietzsche's distinction between Kraft ("force" or "strength") and Macht ("power" or "might").[2] Kraft is primordial strength that may be exercised by anything possessing it, while Macht is, within Nietzsche's philosophy, closely tied to sublimation and "self-overcoming", the conscious channeling of Kraft for creative purposes."

It's easier to make the distinction in other languages. Greek kratos vs. dynamis, Finnish valta vs voima, etc. The "Noble Lie" which goes back to Plato's Politeia, is associated with kratos/valta, what Hegel discussed as Master-Slave dynamic, or more correctly Lordship and Bondage.

Fascist and Neocon philosophers can be highly educated and intelligent, but rationalizing the "Noble Lie" comes from spiritual immaturity and self-deception. Master who thinks he's using the noble lie in his self-interested rule over world, is used by the lie, slave to the lie, and hence deprived of genuine spiritual freedom.

[David Sundaram]

ashvi...@gmail.com wrote:

... But I find myself disagreeing with nearly all of [Jorjani's] philosophical and metaphysical conclusions, and certainly his views about what humanity should be aiming for and how to go about accomplishing those aims.

So much for the value of great 'intellect'! Your disagreement presumably with Jorjani's conclusions about 'war', etc. in the face of our looming climate-change eco-catabrought to mind the image of two male antelopes butting 'heads' in male-power display for 'turf' while a leopard stalks them unseen in the grass around them.

There's degree of 'awareness' and 'awareness of awareness' but this is 'peanuts' compared to degree of 'consciousness' (and 'unconsciousness'!) of what is dynamically active in one and others (unseen, physiosocially speaking) emotional field. Even very intelligent people sometimes enter into self-exploration with 'guides' who know the kinds of 'delusional' shenanigins that human psyches are prone to getting caught up in to uncover aspects of themselves and their relationships which they are not 'aware' of to increase the degree of their insight into their own pesonality-constellation-foibles and achieve a measure of functional interpersonal sanity thereby.

I am trying to figure out why that is. What are the basic axioms that he or I are getting wrong, if any? Why does he follow the same philosophical lines of thinking I follow but end up somewhere completely different? I have a few ideas now, but I will wait to flesh those out later. ...

To figure this out, I would suggest you pay dispassionate attention to (become aware of) your and others' emotional constellations as revealed by your and their personal values and interpersonal behaviors.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

That was an excellent video by Mishlove. I'm actually surprised JJ reacted the way he did (based on what you quoted). The video was almost more complementary of JJ than anything else, certainly not "insulting". Mishlove says that "he is raising an argument that needs to be addressed" and ends by saying "listen to Jason, don't follow him, but listen to him". We need so much more of that wise and gracious attitude with people we disagree with, rather than succumbing to hive-mind instinct to censor and cancel.

As for JJ's 'proposition' as recounted by Mishlove on the video, yeah, I could tell he had something like that in mind based on the interviews, but I didn't know the specifics.  I am convinced that such policies are the inevitable conclusion of 'post-modern' thinking which does not find any telos in the process which brought us to where we are. We cannot rationally argue against such policies because they are devastatingly rock solid in rational terms. We can only stare them head on, as Mishlove says, and then carefully figure out where the assumptions diverged.

[Santeri Satama]

"I am convinced that such policies are the inevitable conclusion of 'post-modern' thinking which does not find any telos in the process which brought us to where we are." 

Post-modern is internal to modernism, not external. It's modernism itself realizing that it can't deliver its promise of techno-utopia, and that "telos", the end, is the "best" it can deliver with nuclear holocaust and social and ecological catastrophy. Falsification of Theory by extinction.

But I still don't know what you mean by "rational" and "rationalism". Modernism, monotheism etc. can and should be reasoned against by reasonable people. 

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"But I still don't know what you mean by "rational" and "rationalism". Modernism, monotheism etc. can and should be reasoned against by reasonable people." 

I mean "rationalism" as a worldview which frames the cosmos as a realm which can be exhaustively understood (or not understood) in rational terms. It therefore denies the non-rational forces ('God', for instance) which are instrumental in humanity. We can certainly reason against perspectives without succumbing to rationalism, in fact I would say rationalism taken to its logical extreme denies the possibility of further reasoning. 

Also, modernism cannot be equated to monotheism in my view. Not only does the latter predate the former by a good 1500+ years, it is neither rationalistic nor materialistic in the same way. Unless you are referring to a particular recent brand of protestant monotheism in the West, which then yes I agree it should be reasoned against precisely because it is rationalistic. 

[Santeri Satama]

Ok, if we take rationalism as exclusion/subversion of empirical and intuition by this or that logical axiom, it becomes irrational lunacy. Which is why in debate mood physicalists and materialists are so easy to beat to pulp with their "own" weapon. Truly rational is to relate logic, empirism and intuition into coherent whole.