[MD] Fritz & Bob

[John Carl]

Michael

On 7/26/15, Michael R. Brown <mrb at fuguewriter.com> wrote:
> 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. :)
>

The interesting thing is, the way lust is coupled with conflict.  We
fight against the other for our own autonomy but the only autonomy
possible is that which is being-in-contrast-to-other.  It's not a
simple thing to pin down, for sure.

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

thanks for sharing.  You've always got the best tales of women, Michael.

John




>
> 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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-- 
"finite players
play within boundaries.
Infinite players
play *with* boundaries."