Science Set Free

[Tyger]

No can do - mainly because there is no New Ager Faith - or New Ager Way of Thinking - Wki and Encarta notwithstanding. No such animal (in my experience) except in the lively imaginations of a few it seems. I was making a joke - very much in a haze from a wine-tasting at the ocean on a brilliant day.

 

[Randall]

No can do - mainly because there is no New Ager Faith - or New Ager Way of thinking - Wki and Encarta notwithstanding. No such animal (in my experience) except in the lively imaginations of a few it seems. I was making a joke - very much in a haze from a wine-tasting at the ocean on a brilliant day.

Sounds like some good times. Enjoy !

 

[smcder]

That sounds very interesting, thanks, I'll give it a listen! I've read Emerson quite a bit, but mostly his poetry.

PS, offtopic: In Ecce Homo Nietzsche explains that Emerson had a lasting influence upon him, and that Emerson's cheerfulness was a gentle tonic to him during his darker hours: “Emerson with his essays has been a good friend and cheered me up even in black periods […] Even as a boy I enjoyed listening to him”.

I kinda went aha! when I read that, it made so much sense, comparing their thinking, and their view of nature.

Also off-topic, but some thing I ran across recently and didn't know where to put it - so maybe it belongs here!

The Twin Souls of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche | Issue 94 | Philosophy Now

The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive philosopher who lived and wrote in relative obscurity; yet to varying extents and with varying results, both thought of themselves as poets. Both also, in their ways, concerned themselves with founding a philosophy grounded in the art of living, turned to Ancient Greece for their aesthetic ideal, and considered contemporary France the heir to its sensual sophistication. Natural born provocateurs, they were both incorrigible cultural agitators who reserved some of their most withering criticism for their ‘so-called countrymen’. Although contemporaries, they were probably unaware of each other, yet both came in their flamboyant personas and utterances to embody the tensions and antagonisms of fin de siècle Europe.

 

[Jimi H.]

...

You've got to read more about it, I think. You've got a lot of stuff mixed up in there. It's all scrambled.

Fair enough, I admit I hadn't looked into it properly, there were some passages that made me interpret it without checking up on the details. But I'm not taking back that it sounds a bit 'made up'. The sceptics' dictionary (sorry for being such a heretic) quotes Sheldrake to shed light on the concept: "the basis of memory in nature....the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species."
morphic resonance - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

It sounds like a construct he made up in his own mind: "Thus, morphogenetic fields are located invisibly in and around organisms, and may account for such hitherto unexplainable phenomena as the regeneration of severed limbs by worms and salamanders, phantom limbs, the holographic properties of memory, telepathy, and the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them"

So, it sounds like Jungian voodoo, not Platonic voodoo!

 

[Jimi H.]

Also off-topic, but some thing I ran across recently and didn't know where to put it - so maybe it belongs here!

The Twin Souls of Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche | Issue 94 | Philosophy Now

The externals of their lives could not be more different. One was a celebrated wit and dramatist, the other a reclusive philosopher who lived and wrote in relative obscurity; yet to varying extents and with varying results, both thought of themselves as poets. Both also, in their ways, concerned themselves with founding a philosophy grounded in the art of living, turned to Ancient Greece for their aesthetic ideal, and considered contemporary France the heir to its sensual sophistication. Natural born provocateurs, they were both incorrigible cultural agitators who reserved some of their most withering criticism for their ‘so-called countrymen’. ..

Looks interesting! I guess they both had a sort of lust for life, and vitality, as in vitalism. And while I'm more than a bit rusty on Wilde, they both spoke their minds, seemingly unhindered by the norms (slave morality) of society.

It is quite hard to see Nietzsche as a role-model for later Nazis, when you consider his scorching remarks on German nationalists or others who'd let their own life be limited by something as mundane as national interests or borders.

Nietszche fascinates me with his poetic language (as seen in Thus spake Zarathustra), and at the same time his talent for withering (great word, very fitting!) criticism. I wouldn't have liked to be on the receiving end of one of Nietszche's diatribes, good lord, that man could reveal the flawed logic, or petty morals, of anyone who ignited his fuse, and he could put it into scathing prose.
I frequently have laughing fits when I read Nietszche's prose, he basically turned put-downs into an artform, some of it is just outrageously mean, but funny.

 

[smcder]

Looks interesting! I guess they both had a sort of lust for life, and vitality, as in vitalism. And while I'm more than a bit rusty on Wilde, they both spoke their minds, seemingly unhindered by the norms (slave morality) of society.

It is quite hard to see Nietzsche as a role-model for later Nazis, when you consider his scorching remarks on German nationalists or others who'd let their own life be limited by something as mundane as national interests or borders.

Nietszche fascinates me with his poetic language (as seen in Thus spake Zarathustra), and at the same time his talent for withering (great word, very fitting!) criticism. I wouldn't have liked to be on the receiving end of one of Nietszche's diatribes, good lord, that man could reveal the flawed logic, or petty morals, of anyone who ignited his fuse, and he could put it into scathing prose.
I frequently have laughing fits when I read Nietszche's prose, he basically turned put-downs into an artform, some of it is just outrageously mean, but funny.

And yet, he may have been an exquisitely sensitive man. His final (sane) act (if that is all true) seems to demonstrate that.

I agree with you about the Nazis - there has been so much scholarship since I read Nietzsche - and I relied mostly on Walter Kaufmann, but it seems I remember his sister may have had something (probably indirectly) to do with that - in terms of how she allowed his posthumous work to be published. I do think if you read Nietzsche you can see that he "prophesied" some of the forces that came in to play with the Nazis - Kaufmann used this example from Zarathustra:

"Thus speaketh the red judge: "Why did this criminal commit murder?
He meant to rob." I tell you, however, that his soul wanted blood, not
booty: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife!"

And this tied in with Mack the Knife in The Three Penny Opera and also Raskolnivkov in Crime and Punishment (it seems like Nietzsche was aware of Dostoyevsky, if I remember?)

In terms of being on the receiving end - I think "The Case of Wagner" is a good example.

It has been so long since I read Nietzsche but he's popped up here and there on the forums and in podcasts I've listened to - and of course, his influence is all over the place - still, I've been reluctant to pick him up again . . . in fact, I can just hear him saying to me that perhaps I am not strong enough for this . . . !

 

[flipper]

From Page 157 of "Demanding the Impossible." "This accusation [ that Nietzsche was the forerunner of Nazism] was made possible by the work of his sister, who selectively edited his works when he became mad......... One of the main reasons he broke with Wagner was because of the composer's anti-Antisemitism." Now his view on women is a different matter.

 

[boomerang]

It has been so long since I read Nietzsche but he's popped up here and there on the forums and in podcasts I've listened to - and of course, his influence is all over the place - still, I've been reluctant to pick him up again . . . in fact, I can just hear him saying to me that perhaps I am not strong enough for this . . . !

Human, all too human !

The small percentage of Nietzsche's work I have read and seem to understand leaves of the impression of a brilliant man who simply hated the human condition. Perhaps he was as much misanthrope as anti-semite, and certainly a product of his times.

 

[Jimi H.]

And yet, he may have been an exquisitely sensitive man.

I imagine he was, related to that, he seems to have had great psychological insight, I'm sure Freud etc. learned much from Nietszche.

..it seems I remember his sister may have had something (probably indirectly) to do with that - in terms of how she allowed his posthumous work to be published.

Yea, I see that Flipper already mentioned that she directly edited his last work to streamline with the Nazi cause. Pretty sad story.

In terms of being on the receiving end - I think "The Case of Wagner" is a good example.

Yes, indeed. Besides, it has become a bit of a contemporary curse, but reading Nietsche's 'honest' self-conscious irony simply sounds modern, it always gets me that he sounds like he could have lived now, I guess he succeeded in becoming 'timeless':

To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, to get to like anything else whatever afterwards was for me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps, had ever been more dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been so overjoyed at ridding himself of it. A long history!
..
What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become “timeless.” With what then does the philosopher have the greatest fight?
With all that in him which makes him the child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner — i.e., I am a decadent. The only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me struggled against it."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25012/25012-pdf.pdf

.. I've been reluctant to pick him up again . . . in fact, I can just hear him saying to me that perhaps I am not strong enough for this . . . !

I hear you. In fact, the Transcendentalists were a gentle tonic to me after reading Nietzsche, as they were to him, too He had a cold eye, and that's how I read him, but there is more to the world than that!

You guys should read Edward Abbey, a post-Nietszchean / post-transcendentalist American brimming with the same kind of self-conscious humor. On mis-anthropy:

.. I was accused of being against civilization, against science, against humanity. Naturally, I was flattered and at the same time surprised, hurt, a little shocked. He repeated the charge. But how, I replied, being myself a member of humanity (albeit involuntarily, without prior consultation), could I be against humanity without being against myself, whom I love - though not very much; how can I be against science, when I gratefully admire, as much as I can, Thales, Democritus, Aristarchus, Faustus, Paracelsus, Copernicus, Galiley, Kepler, Newton, Darwin and Einstein; and finally, how could I be against civilization when all which I most willingly defend and venerate - including the love of wilderness - is comprehended by the term."

From Desert Solitaire

It doesn't get much better in my notebook

 

[smcder]

From Page 157 of "Demanding the Impossible." "This accusation [ that Nietzsche was the forerunner of Nazism] was made possible by the work of his sister, who selectively edited his works when he became mad......... One of the main reasons he broke with Wagner was because of the composer's anti-Antisemitism." Now his view on women is a different matter.

Thank you for posting this - I didn't think about the anti-semitism,

I imagine he was, related to that, he seems to have had great psychological insight, I'm sure Freud etc. learned much from Nietszche.


Yea, I see that Flipper already mentioned that she directly edited his last work to streamline with the Nazi cause. Pretty sad story.


Yes, indeed. Besides, it has become a bit of a contemporary curse, but reading Nietsche's 'honest' self-conscious irony simply sounds modern, it always gets me that he sounds like he could have lived now, I guess he succeeded in becoming 'timeless':


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25012/25012-pdf.pdf


I hear you. In fact, the Transcendentalists were a gentle tonic to me after reading Nietzsche, as they were to him, too He had a cold eye, and that's how I read him, but there is more to the world than that!

You guys should read Edward Abbey, a post-Nietszchean / post-transcendentalist American brimming with the same kind of self-conscious humor. On mis-anthropy:


From Desert Solitaire

It doesn't get much better in my notebook

I will try Abbey and thank you for the reference!

I imagine he was, related to that, he seems to have had great psychological insight, I'm sure Freud etc. learned much from Nietszche.

Ecce Homo! - I think he makes claims about his self insight in this book. If I were to start back with Nietzsche it would be with Ecce Homo - and Freud or Jung one I thought commented on Nietzsche's insight as a psychologist and isn't there a movie about Freud and Nietzsche? . . . I feel I'm being drawn back into the abyss - but he is so basic, so encompassing, that I feel like I am avoiding him.

Speaking of cold eyes - one of his books or biographical material from Kaufmann has it that his grandmother could see through people, that others were very uncomfortable under her knowing gaze and I could well imagine encountering Nietzsche would also be uncomfortable. I suppose you could always make fun of his moustache and then duck out while he was spluttering!