[MD] Fritz & Bob

[John Carl]

J-A,

You've got some pretty good tales yourself!

On 7/27/15, Jan Anders Andersson <jananderses at telia.com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> There is a problem with ”God is man’s greatest idea”:
>
> No one is able to look inside any other’s brain.

Jc:  I don't think of that as a "bug", so much as a feature.  I like
owning my own thinking.  The fact that it takes work to clarify and
explain myself, is what everything like philosophy and language, are
all about.  It's the ambiguity that creates the truth, in an ironic
way.  "The Ironic Turn", I'm sure some modern pragmatists would
nominate it.


J-A:

>
> That means that no one can be sure about what the other’s idea about God is
> like. The idea about God pertains as an individual matter at the social
> level.



I think it takes careful statement of levels of abstraction, to talk
about God in a metaphysical manner.  That means God as some kind of
objectified concept.  God as an idea.  How this idea arises in
individuals, as well as societies, seems to me to be the interesting
question.

And as to the ambiguity, well, it takes work.

"I don't foresee much good from a philosophical society. Philosophy
discussion proper only succeeds between intimates who have learned how
to converse by months of weary trial and failure. The philosopher is a
beast dwelling in his individual burrow. Count me out!"19 True, as
I've noted, James joined the APA and was elected president in 1905.
But his better self is evident in his initial refusal. He knew from
long experience with the likes of Charles Peirce and Josiah Royce that
philosophers best converse with intimates through months of weary
trial and failure. This is so because we grope for meaning, and we
must be able to trust others to patiently show where we are going
wrong and to help us to go right. How would James react to the greatly
impersonal and rushed atmosphere of philosophy today? I think he would
be appalled."

I sure do like my kindle version of Wilshire's book.  I could just go
on and on with that thing...

John

>
> Jan-Anders
>
>
>> 26 jul 2015 x kl. 22:31 skrev Michael R. Brown <mrb at fuguewriter.com>:
>>
>> 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)
>>>>>
>>>>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>>>>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>>>>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>>>>> Archives:
>>>>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>>>>> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>>>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>>>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>>>> Archives:
>>>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>>>> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Moq_Discuss mailing list
>> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
>> Archives:
>> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
>> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>


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