Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 15:17:16 -0500
From: albright-AT-world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
Subject: Re: Nietzsche and Rationalism


Hi, John.

>Certainly the Caesars will infuse their personalities into the
>becoming Imperium, and the first to do so will have the greatest
>opportunity. Is this what you mean by giving? Define tyranny.

You have yet to define "the becoming Imperium", my friend. But for tyranny,
I think I would go back to John Stuart Mill's still brilliant "On Liberty"
essay, which warns that the majority can oppress the minority, that even
when one considers another's "well being" as one perceives it (the threat
of prohibition on alcohol was on the horizon), it is none of the
government's business as long as the individual does not interfere with the
well-being of others in society. Mill also does a valiant defense of
"eccentricity", which people like Foucault might call civilization's way of
delineating "mad" versus "sane" people. By diffusing it to "eccentric",
Mill allows for the widest possible heterogeneous society possible, in my
opinion.

>>As he said in "The Birth of Tragedy", we have to distinguish WISDOM from
>>mere KNOWLEDGE.
>
>And what greater wisdom is there than historical wisdom?
>Do not all of man's creations have a history?

Historical wisdom has nothing to do with "Dionysian" or GUT reactions to
things, as well as to imagination or other intuitive faculties. But, yes,
for example, in trying to avoid a possible worldwide depression right now
with the crisis in SouthEast Asia, people are drawing on lessons learned
from the Great Depression, such as trade barriers, freezing money supply
instead of loosening up (the hope is that the IMF will be funded enough to
bail these countries out, while imposing control with the money to make
sure that future disasters don't happen again, as in our S&L crisis of the
early 1990s). So history is a guide. But then there is also what Blake
called:

        "What was once imagined is now proved."

No one thought of the relativity theory before Einstein. And again, as I
was saying that Nietzsche's thought does not eradicate, but rather
counter-balances prevailing trends of thought in the Enlightenment-- my
belief is that we need a BROADER tent of enlightenment, myself, in both the
Eastern and Western senses of the word-- Einstein's theories did not simply
replace Newton's. Newton's still have a great deal of validity in them.
Galileo, Pythogorus, and others, too. But it would be a contracted state of
knowledge, which I think Nietzsche (as well as the Dalia Lhama) would laugh
at, which thinks that all we have is empirical evidence and past experience
to build on, for future-- in many forms of the word. Be it a more tolerant
society, a more creative inter-action with the arts, etc.

(I am also a fan of Roland Barthes, who uses Nietzsche a great deal as a
proponent of reader's rights. Emerson, too, was a proponent of this, when
he said, in "The American Scholar" address, to take only the stuff that's
TRUE and leave the bunk behind.)

>I'm speaking of Rationalism losing everything
>of real value along the lines of Goethe's _Faust_ and his criticism
>of the logical dissection of the living whole yielding nothing
>but a lifeless husk.

Although I have not read _Faust_, I see this "lifeless husk" in many other
arenas. The Cartesian mind/body split. The work, work, work, but have no
play, of the Protestant Work Ethic. I don't know if you know, but I
recently read that George Emerson, in Forster's _Room With A View_, was
created largely as Forster's response to "Birth of Tragedy"... the
de-stabilizing George against the prissy hovering woman that's guarding
Lucy, or what would have been an ill-fated marriage to Cecil (sexless).

>Does not becoming connote creativity and do we not at some
>point exhaust the necessary creative inner chaos?

"Becoming" connotes being alive, yes. I don't think we NEED to ever
"exhaust" our own inner chaos, however, out of which much creativity comes.
The de-centering--- the way we build a sandcastle up and up and up, and
then it gets washed away. However, to counter-point this, William James
once said that the most powerful revolutions leave the great majority of
our world unchanged, which is interesting. His point is often that if we
can simply TRY to break out of "habit", that we're doing a good job to try
to stay on the "genius" side, versus "old-fogeyism" (_Principles of
Psychology_)

>At a glance, the predator sees the inner secret of its prey and then
>fixes the prey in its minds eye. Modern human language, with
>its words, came in the second stage of human development.
>We were fully human before we created modern language. As such,
>a physignomic sceptic places primary emphasis on the most
>real form of human thought. BGE 209.

Well... have you read Julian Jaynes' _The Origins of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_? Regardless of HOW it happened, here we
are: in a too right-handed, Apollonian/Socrates-tilted world. And yet to
tilt it back too much to Dionysus would be dangerous, too: anarchy. I
disagree, by the way, with Nietzsche's construct that music is not "image".
When you listen to something that's trying to express "The Blue Danube",
that's musical imagery merely trying to re-create it in an art form, like
any other language (I majored in what was then called Semiotics-- signs and
symbols). Even something like Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" has a fairly
predictable 1-2-3 bass line, upon which the sax can improvise.

Still, I think it's an interesting construct. I happen to be a musician
myself. Sometimes I write lyrics first, then put them to what feels like
appropriate music. Other times I write music, then try to express the
gesture further in poetry. Goes both ways, for me.

>>>with a morphological insight
>>>into the phenomenon of the cultural lifecycle, as well as human ethology,
>>>leading one to perceive the three stages of human development?

>Which word don't you understand?

Just--- what are you trying to say? That we need to reintegrate the
hemispheres of our brain, as I think of it? The "three stages" sound to be
like an interesting construct. Similarly, I've often thought of Freud's
Id/Libido as Dionysus and Ego/Super-Ego as Apollo/Socrates. Civilization
and Its Discontents...

Question for me becomes: how to UNalienate. In Camus's words, how to make
"the stranger" not estranged anymore. (Camus died with a copy of The Gay
Science in his crashed car.)

>The final struggle for the soul of the state has already begun.

There is no "final", just as there was no "beginning", in my opinion. It's
evolution. We are where we are, and we take it from there.

>>
>>Nietzsche provides no stable ground, which is similar to Keats' "negative
>>capability", in my view. If there IS no stable ground, however... one must
>>have ideals, such as Siddhartha and Jesus had, don't you think?
>>
>>        ---Randall Albright
>>
>For the physiognomic sceptic, Nietzsche, with some judicious weeding
>out here and there, provides a superlative foundation....

Physiognomy: the study of facial features. What are you saying? Nietzsche
was a dark, brooding guy. It was written on his face much of the time. I'd
personally have that be ONE of my many rainbow of moods that I move
through, myself.

>As for Jesus, he was quite clear:
>
>1. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's
>2. My kingdom is not of this world.

Well... he DID say a few more things than that, John! Like:

1. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Or some variation on that.)
2. Forgive one another, as you would at least pretend that God is doing for you.
3. Care for the poor.

Although Jesus died a martyr, and is something that perhaps Nietzsche would
rather not like, I might point out that much of what Jesus said was
reiterated hundreds of years earlier by Siddhartha, who lived a much longer
life. As far as Jesus's kingdom not being of this world? Well...
complicated, isn't it? Who's the first one in, last one out, to places like
Ethiopia for famine much of the time? Catholic Church. Maybe it's just to
save souls, but they're there. Jesus, in my book, was a nice guy. I have no
problem, like Nietzsche's disciple, D.H. Lawrence, who tried to re-write
his life ("The Man Who Died"), and have him come down off the cross. I
think that's how Jesus wanted to go, and he had every right to do it
(Pilate gave him at least a few chances to avoid it, as I recall.)

But, personally, I prefer Master mentality to Slave mentality because it's
from a position of power that I can better help people. If I give all my
money away to the poor, I then become poor and am dependent on the very
hand-outs which I supposedly pitied. So that part of the Jesus doctrine
doesn't make sense, whereas Nietzsche's does (at least the way *I*
interpret it at this point).

Take care---

        Randall Albright
                http://world.std.com/~albright/




	--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---