But is it truly bad faith, if the poractitioner is invested in both
sides of the outcome? If the aim of the magician (or the sophist) is
to evolve and gain knowledge, then aren't all perspectives necessary
to do that?
There is also the gain of the dialectician: Thesis, antithesis,
Synthesis. Combinations of these two processes, an lead to a knew
understanding and a better ability to persuade someone else of the new
(view/truth of?) reality.
Just a thought, not saying either interpretation is necessarily
correct.
-Damien
--- Mandrake of Oxford <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Friend
>
> Perhaps an element of Crowley's training schema for magicians
> ie that they should cultivate the ability to argue the case from
> both
> sides -
> as in the classical techniques of the sophists.
>
> That kind of practice found its way into Pete Caroll's reworking of
> the
> whole
> Crowley thing into his first book on Chaos Magick - _Liber Null_.
> AFAIK chaos magicians still take this idea quite seriously -
> ie i sure i read an article either in Chaos International or Oracle
> where
> the
> current head of the IOT says how he was a 'lefty' most of his life
> but then
> decided he would be a 'fascist' for a while as some sort of
> intellectual
> exercise -
> which strikes me as about rhetoric - perhaps with the aim of
> deconditioning
> etc.
>
> Personally i was never that impressed by that idea in crowley et al
> - always struck me as 'bad faith' -
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