As I see it, we would benefit more from being honest with ourselves and admit that there are those who have far more interesting and important things to say than we do. But perhaps I am wrong and there will be books and seminars and classes devoted to studying green flag. — Fooloso4

You made me laugh. I really don't know. I might have a cute grimy little novel in me, along the lines of Nausea. But it'd be a fun, nasty little book. Did you ever read Steppenwolf ? What Hesse and Kundera and others do is great.

I will very much jump on your self-honesty bandwagon. I think it's hard as fuck to do something worthy. The self, in my estimation, is largely an illusion. There is only one philosopher, and you and I are little pieces of this software, which runs on a cloud of human brains networked by language and so on. You can call our egoism the cunning of reason. Why would such a program benefit from an adversarial distribution ? Perhaps because each 'self' (local version) is a candidate tribe ego. That pugnacious self-esteem and self-assertion should prevail is to be expected in both genetic and memetic competition.

When they talk about the great green flag, they'll really being talking about themselves, and we their past will be the given which they transcend and include and (to some degree, for the most part) forget.

When they talk about the great green flag, they'll really being talking about themselves. — green flag

As long as you get the money and the girls, what will it matter? :cool:

Gossip? Is this an example of frankly violent and shameless interpretation? — Fooloso4

I'm referring to Heidegger's notion of chatter. Our 'given' is the sediment of decisions made before our arrival. This layer of 'interpretedness' is why ontology requires de(-con-)struction. The past leaps ahead as prejudices we do not know they have. These prejudices are revealed along with that which is interpreted. The same process that brings the object to light makes us visible to ourselves as historical beings who, after all, were not just starting and staring without presuppositions.

Warning others away from the risk of creativity ? — green flag

Not at all.

But are you not just as concerned about such a role itself being boring ? — green flag

Some might find it boring, I do not.

Could not a bot be assigned to this task ? — green flag

Not very well, but that may change. But even if it could, for me careful reading and interpretation is a way of thinking, and requires creativity to do well.

Here's Emerson's version of idle talk and its opposite. — green flag

Why are you reading Emerson? Do you equate interpretation with idle talk?

This is one of those books that looks good on a shelf but is not to be believed and acted upon, for that would not be respectable, not nearly as respectable as the safely dead and famous name. — green flag

I hope it does not come as a shock to you but Emerson is safely dead and his too is a famous name.

Wow. I hope you're just sleepy. You speak of 'careful reading,' but here's a reminder of our conversation.


I quoted 'Self Reliance' by Emerson and then say "this is one of those books that looks good on a shelf but is not to be believed and acted upon, for that would not be respectable, not nearly as respectable as the safely dead and famous name."

You tell me that "Emerson is safely dead and his too is a famous name."

How could you miss that the point was the contrast between fetishizing from a safe distance and actually 'ingesting' a great spirit ? That he is safely dead is alluded to intentionally, obviously, for what's insinuated is that a living nonconformist, the kind that Emerson encourages, would be cautioned or cancelled by the same mediocrities who think they value Emerson the spirit yet mostly value the respectable stink of his name. This is not aimed at anyone in particular but at idle talk that dares not face its reflection. The Anyone has in idle talk its true form of being. In case it's not obvious from context, Heidegger is no authority. He points out a phenomenon that others can grasp themselves. Clearly Heidegger and Emerson are saying similar things here. It takes guts to be a someone in this bucket full of crabs. It's only a someone who can genuinely die, perhaps because only they are completely alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

Do you equate interpretation with idle talk? — Fooloso4

To me that's a strange question indeed, unless you are referring not to interpretation but rather to interpretedness. This term is used in the Farin/Skinner translation of the 'Dilthey draft' (the ~100 page The Concept of Time). The idle talk of one generation can thought of as the inherited 'sediment' of interpretations decided by previous generations. On page 27, we read "we are now in a position to understand idle talk as the way interpretation is preserved. In idle talk interpretation becomes free-floating; it belongs to everyone and comes from nobody. In idle talk interpretation hardens into interpretedness. [Ausgelegtheit]. Dasein...grows up in and grows into such interpretedness." It might be said that idle talk is in the way of genuine interpretation. Or we might say that philosophy is idle talk trying to climb out of itself. "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake. " But we 'are' that history, trying for more light, more awareness, more what ?

As long as you get the money and the girls, what will it matter? :cool: — Tom Storm

That made me laugh. If I recall correctly, Mencken laughed at his typewriter, cigar in his mouth, and Joyce annoyed his wife by laughing at his work on FW in the middle of the night. Naked willing females wallowing on piles of cash is a sufficient but not strictly necessary reward. Probably safer to be a married guy who drinks too much coffee and is glad to find each morning that they haven't run out of bananas and peanutbutter yet.

Dickens also used to laugh as he wrote, and he even did all the voices of his characters out loud as he penned their dialogue. I would give anything to hear that... I imagine Shakespeare doing similarly - smart actors make great writers.

I love how we can go from Heidegger's notions of chatter to putative supplies of bananas and peanutbutter in the same thread...

I love how we can go from Heidegger's notions of chatter to putative supplies of bananas and peanutbutter in the same thread... — Tom Storm

Me too. Existentialism done right. Desolation Angels is one of my favorite works. Sort of the same idea.

Dickens also used to laugh as he wrote, and he even did all the voices of his characters out loud as he penned their dialogue. I would give anything to hear that... — Tom Storm

Me too. Last one I read was Bleak House. Powerful stuff. Brings tears to my eyes. I'd love to hear Dickens switch from one great character to another.

I imagine Shakespeare doing similarly - smart actors make great writers. — Tom Storm

Yes. The whole shebang is theatre. In case you might like it (or someone else), I found this killer performance of The Iceman Cometh recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etEFM_B9YS0
Apparently O'Neill thought like a composer. This play felt like an apocalypse to me.

I will leave it there. I am going to return to the eternal return.

... in essence what is Nietzsche hoping his readers will gain from ER? — Tom Storm

I don't think that he hopes that there is anything in essence the reader will gain. In the section of TSZ entitled "Reading and Writing" he says:

He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader.

He leaves his readers to their own devices. There are different kinds of readers. What they get is up to them.

Zarathustra is another name for Zoroaster. In Zoroastrianism there is a constant battle between the forces of good and evil that will come to an end with the victory of the force of good over evil. In Christianity there is also the final victory of good over evil with the kingdom of God or Heaven on earth.

There is an ancient opposing idea, the eternal return.

Rather than being opposite poles there is a continual overcoming and reversal of what is held to be good or evil throughout history. There is no fixed nature, including no fixed human nature. In the Uses and Abuses of History for Life Nietzsche says:

...first nature was at one time or another once a second nature and that every victorious second nature becomes a first nature.

A cycle but not, as the dwarf would have it, a circle.

In the section of The Gay Science entitled “What I Owe the Ancients” Nietzsche says:

For only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian condition, does the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct express itself—its “will to life.” What did the Hellene procure in these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and made sacred in the past; the triumphant yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective survival through reproduction, through the mysteries of sexuality. (90)

...

And thus I touch again upon the spot from which I first set out—The Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: thus I take my stand again upon the ground from which grows my willing, my being able—I, the final follower of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence . . . (91)

Dionysus, the god who philosophizes. What is the significance of this? According to Socrates the gods are wise. The philosopher desires wisdom but remains ignorant. He questions but does not have answers to his questions. There is no final word as to why things are as they or to what will be. The same holds true of a god who philosophizes. We all, men and gods, remain ignorant.

In an endnote to his introduction to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols Tracy Strong points out:

15. Nietzsche in fact projected a major work to be called “The Eternal Return of the Same,” the divisions of which would be examinations of various aspects of embodiment (Einverleibung). WKG V2 p. 392.

In TSZ the battle between good and evil occurs on the human scale. The question of whether it occurs on the cosmological scale raises the question of the connection between what is human and life itself. In Dionysus' teaching, a teaching that has returned once again, the modern objective scientific separation of knower and known does not hold. The cosmology of eternal return is not about something that is apart from us. But it is not limited to us. Quite the opposite, it is about the infinite unknown.

Thank you for taking the trouble to do this. Do you personally find the idea of eternal recurrence compelling? I think translator Walter Kauffman might have been on to something about Nietzsche's work being "easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” I had a go at the new translation of On the Genealogy of Morality by Clark and Swensen but just find it turgid and dull, even with those flashes of mordant humour.

Do you personally find the idea of eternal recurrence compelling? — Tom Storm

I don't.

One thing that may not have been made clear is that with Christianity's self-overcoming,
the eternal return, with its philosopher-god Dionysus, is to serve as the new earth bound and philosophically grounded religion. There is an ancient contest between philosophy and religion. Christian theologians regard philosophy as the handmaid of religion. Nietzsche reverses that order, which is to say returns to an older order. He intends for religion to serve as the handmaid of a philosophy in the service of life.

"easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” — Tom Storm

I think his writing is deliberately and deceptively easy to read. This should give you some sense why.

This should give you some sense why. — Fooloso4

Hmmm... I find the histrionic narcissism repellant. 'I... I... I... me... me... me... blood... courage... goblins...

I can understand that. What kind of philosopher talks this way? How many will read this and toss the book aside? It is as if he wants to antagonize the reader. As if he does not want to be read. But why?

Z. says he does not want idle readers, but as Kaufman noted, he is easy to read. Nothing here of the formidable language of Kant or Hegel. Socrates says he does not write because if he did then anyone and everyone could read what he said, and by not speaking directly with them there is no chance to clear up misunderstandings. Plato developed a way of writing that attempts to minimize that problem. It was not until quite recently that it became unacceptable for philosophers to guard their words from the general public.

Nietzsche, like Dionysus, wears masks. His bombastic style is a mask. What we see is not Nietzsche but the masks he chooses to wear.

I think Nietzsche is saying that the problem with recounting cultural history is entangled with the problem of accepting 'natural' science as proceeding from a given ground. The question of cause and effect is raised in the context of what is past and present in all events. These passages are a small sample of an often repeated theme:

205
Need.- Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be.

217
Cause and effect.- Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does afterward. — ibid, The Gay Science.

As you note, Nietzsche wants to cancel the teleological framework through which events are described. Nonetheless, he also wants to relate a record of the past that can be accepted as such. This is why he approaches it as a work of genealogy; What has come about may be a compilation of accidents and 'errors' but the sequence of events places us here, in the moment.

The 'will to power' perspective lets us gather evidence in a different way but is it a replacement for what it cancels? The question asked back at 109 about whether one view of nature has been brought to an end and another has begun still lingers after other matters have been decided.

I am confused by your use of the term 'historicism". It is used by the detractors of Nietzsche and Heidegger to object to the idea we are a collection of circumstances without any sort of inherent nature shaping outcomes in our experience.

I find the histrionic narcissism repellant. 'I... I... I... me... me... me... blood... courage... goblins... — Tom Storm

He gave Wagner hell for what they had in common perhaps, for being an actor, a drama queen. I recall Socrates asking the poets where they got their stuff from and not liking their answers. Nietzsche is like some prank the gods pull. One body was stuffed with both a mad poet and a mercilessly ironic analyst.