[MD] Fritz & Bob

Michael R. Brown mrb at fuguewriter.com
Sun Jul 26 13:31:54 PDT 2015


Paglia's masterwork "Sexual Personae" turns on the idea that truly great 
creation comes from synthesis of male and female energies, archetypes, 
roles - call them what you will.

Sounds like Classical and Romantic to me. :)

She's on the hotter Romantic side, as RMP is on the cool, collected 
Classical side.


MRB

On 7/25/2015 9:46 PM, John Carl wrote:
> 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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