[MD] Fritz & Bob

John Carl ridgecoyote at gmail.com
Sat Jul 25 19:46:47 PDT 2015


ooh Michael... I think not.


On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 11:40 AM, Michael R. Brown <mrb at fuguewriter.com>
wrote:

> Camille Paglia, Nietzsche's latter-day heir, would be interesting to map
> onto RMP and vice versa. I think they may converge.
>
>
> MRB



"Paglia has said that she is willing to have her entire career judged on
the basis of her composition of what she considers to be 'probably the most
important sentence that she has ever written': 'God is man's greatest
idea.' "


dmb ain't gonna go for that. I'd be interested tho.  I imagine she would
avoid what Bruce Wilshire terms, Nietzsche's 'androcentric bias'.

"The woman is not pent-up, she flows, she oozes, she disturbs the male
insistence on excluded middles for thought (something is either A or not-A)
and closed categories for control.  In The Marine Lover of Frederick
Nietzsche, she points out tellingly his androcentric biases that persist
despite his genius: His projection of himself onto the world, so he finds
only mirror images of himself-or sheer absences and dreadful loneliness.'
He never really lives in the life of the other. Most tellingly she finds
not nearly enough water and flow in his world, and his totem animals are
land and air creatures, not water ones. Thus again the rigid oppositions
and exclusions of androcentric western philosophy.  Only apparently
paradoxically, the latest things-such as Irigarian feminism-point back to
primal peoples. In fact, the most creative philosophical thought of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries does the same thing. I mean at least
Emerson, Peirce, James, Dewey, Heidegger, Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty. This
had to happen, I think, because the whole androcentric tradition of
rampant, self-oblivious abstraction fairly obviously bankrupted itself the
more irrepressibly modern it became. The only way remaining was to turn
back and establish contact with our sources. Quantum physics also must be
associated with this turn, as I will try to show. Look for a moment again
at James-that adorable genius, as Whitehead called him. His last decade is
a creative frenzy. In 1901, sick in bed, he explores life in extremis in
Varieties of Religious Experience. As we noted, the hither side of mystical
or conversion experiences may be the human subconscious, but the farther is
unclassifiable, "the more," the mysterious grounds of regenerative power:
at moments we sense that there is an enormous domain that we do not know we
do not know. Then in 1904 he is able finally to completely abandon the
British empiricist charade of putatively basic "sense data in the mind." As
we've seen, he advances a radical empiricism of pure experience, a level of
encounter and interfusion in the world that antecedes the very distinction
between self and other, subject and object. Some of his last work, A
Pluralistic Universe, for example, repudiates "vicious intellectualism,"
the long-standing androcentric bias that what is not explicitly included in
something's definition, neatly packaged in its alleged unitary being, is
excluded from its reality."


John






>
>
> On 7/24/2015 9:06 AM, david wrote:
>
>> I've been thinking about the work Arlo did a few years back.
>>
>> Good stuff. Here are most the central quotes he'd used...
>>
>> "We shall do a great deal for the science of esthetics, once we perceive
>> not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of
>> intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the
>> Apollonian and Dionysian duality..." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> "... there existed a sharp opposition, in origin and aims, between the
>> Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-plastic, Dionysian, art of
>> music.... they continually incite each other to new and more powerful
>> births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by
>> the common term 'Art'..." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> Pointing towards the undifferentiated continuum, Nietzsche writes, "The
>> higher truth [Apollonian forms], the perfection of these states in
>> contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world.. is at the
>> same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the
>> arts generally, which makes life possible and worth living. (Nietzsche)
>>
>> Interesting here, Nietzsche is not describing the Apollonian impulse
>> towards form as "bad" while setting up the Dionysian impulse towards
>> dissolution as "good", but instead that without form, without the
>> apprehension of pattern from the unpatterned landscape, life would not
>> only be not worth living but impossible in the first place. Although
>> "form" is an abstraction, it is an abstraction we cannot do without.
>>
>> Nietzsche refers to the Apollonian as "the man wrapped in Maya"
>> (Schopenhauer), "... so in the midst of a world of sorrows the
>> individual sits quietly, supported by and trusting in his principium
>> individuationis" (Schopenhauer quoted).
>>
>> This principium is summed by Wikipedia as "...the name given to
>> processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to
>> those processes through which differentiated components become
>> integrated into stable wholes."
>>
>> In short, it is the perception of form within chaos, the apprehension of
>> stability within flux, the sensing of coherence within the
>> incomprehensible. "We might consider Apollo himself as the glorious
>> divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and
>> expression tell us of all the joy and wisdom of 'appearance', together
>> with its beauty." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> But alongside the impulse towards differentiation, one has to also
>> consider as equally important Dionysian impulse towards dissolution.
>>
>> "Schopenhauer has depicted for us the terrible awe which seizes upon
>> man, when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a
>> phenomenon, when the principle of reason, in some one of its
>> manifestations, seems to admit an exception... at this very collapse of
>> the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature
>> of the Dionysian." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> Thus for Nietzsche the structures of Apollonian form are at once and
>> always incomplete. Through "the immediate certainty of intuition" we
>> sense exceptions, and when we stop and gaze into that incompleteness, we
>> find the song of Dionysus.
>>
>> Nietzsche describes the Dionysian impulse as that which "cause[s] the
>> subjective to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness".
>>
>> In the following quote, I hear Pirsig's talk in ZMM about our
>> estrangement from nature and being one with the world brought on by not
>> only dominance of "rationality", but the abandonment of the romantic
>> "groove". Nietzsche talks about the same phenomena, a world where
>> Apollonian dominates and Dionysian impulses are denigrated.
>>
>> "Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and
>> man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile or
>> subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigical
>> son, man. ... Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile
>> barriers, which necessity, caprice or 'shameless fashion' have erected
>> between man and man, are broken down... he feels as if the veil of Maya
>> had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the
>> mysterious Primordial Unity." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> Nietzsche continues, "He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of
>> art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature
>> reveals itself to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity."
>>
>> "We have considered  the Apollonian and its antithesis, the Dionsysian,
>> as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the
>> mediation of the human artist..." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> I note here that both the "tendency towards form" and the "tendency
>> towards dissolution" are both "artistic energies" in Nietzsche's
>> telling, and that, like the MOQ's levels emerge directly from Quality.
>>
>> "... energies in which nature's art-impulses are satisfied in the most
>> immediate and direct way: first, on the one hand, in the pictorial world
>> of dreams, whose completeness is not dependent upon the intellectual
>> attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and... as a
>> drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the single unit, but even
>> seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of
>> Oneness." (Nietzsche)
>>
>> For Nietzsche, the Greek Dionysian was not simply
>> biological "licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and
>> its venerable traditions" (Nietzsche).
>>
>> Earlier Greek culture, according to Nietzsche, was dominated by the
>> Apollonian impulse, and is evidenced best in the Homeric tradition.
>> Alongside this sat the Dionysian impulses, evidenced as folk-revelry and
>> festivals. As these impulses synthesized in Greek culture, the Tragedy
>> was born, and we saw for a moment in time what Pirsig saw in the early
>> Hippie movement.
>>
>> "This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of the
>> Greek cult: wherever we turn we note the revolutions resulting from this
>> event... If we observe how, under the pressure of this treaty of peace,
>> the Dionysian power revealed itself, we shall now recognize... the
>> significance of festivals of world-redemption and transfiguration."
>> (Nietzsche)
>>
>> I'll nod again to Dionysian being equatable with pre-intellectual
>> awareness, expressed as the "tendency towards dissolution" in the
>> following, "In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest
>> exaltation of all his symbolic features; something never before
>> experienced struggles for utterance - the annihilation of the the veil
>> of Maya, Oneness as the soul of the race, and of nature itself."
>> (Nietzsche)
>>
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