A while since I read my Nietzsche, but as I consolidate my writing I’m noting reminders in everyday life. Articulating the real science / non-science issue remains pretty central to a large part of the problem statement, still proving tricky in a world that increasingly doesn’t appreciate how addicted to science – technocracy – it is. (That’s technocracy in the technical, not technological sense, but the latter feeds the former.)
This LinkedIn post from Nuno Reis and exchanges with Auke Hunneman and Carlos Velasco are exactly on point. (The latter two are Business School staff – funny how so much complex systems thinking is gravitating to business schools and business consulting – long gone the Harvard mantra of “just run the numbers” – the search for excellence continues.)
[My summary] We’re becoming the “Last Man” Nietzsche warned us about. And the need for us to realise the Übermensch beyond the petty shallowness of our instant and ubiquitously connected world. Attention as that moral imperative, etc.
[Hunneman] “And perhaps, instead of focusing too much on the Apollonian rationalism, embrace some Dionysian non-scientific worldview that may help you charter into the unknown. Beauty leads us to truth as a becoming. Science portrays everything as dead matter, but for true self transformation, you need to embrace uncertainty and achieve your potential (which is a dynamic perspective). This ultimately is a creative act.”
Truth as becoming, not being facts. That recurring metaphysical-dynamic process-ontology world-view.
====
Previously – most recently (Aug 2024) – from Keegan Kjeldsen. – Nietzsche scholar linking to his Pirsigian narrative.
Previously (Apr 2005) Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four”.
‘Now reading Caldwell and Thomason’s “Rule of Four”. Picked up and blogged about the subject of this book – the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – soon after I’d read Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”, when I’d seen “Rule of Four” described as being Eco’s “Name of the Rose” written in the style of Donna Tartt. (Though since Dan Brown has ejaculated all over this memespace in the intervening year, I now prefer the UK Independent’s rather snooty tag of “The Da Vinci Code for people with brains”.) A promising start – like Tartt’s Secret History the plot involves the riskier side of US College frat house traditions – Apollonian Educated Genius vs Dionysian Reckless Madness leading (presumably) to a Love (and Humour) Conquers All thesis?’
Previously (2001 – deleted!!! and quoted) – Donna Tartt’s “Secret History”. (Checked the Wayback Archive of the deleted post – it is literally the same as the linked post with a different title – seems I never did an actual review.)
“I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from the subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
Previously – all explicit Nietzsche references.
=====
I last really read Nietzsche in the 1980s, other than a recent review of his spat with Wagner. I remember him mainly a source of clever, beguiling, intoxicating, if maddeningly ambiguous, thoughts (perhaps they could be no other). I have something of relevance here, though, from my old notes (taken from the Basic Writings, edited by Kaufmann):
“Transform Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck – then you will approach the Dionysian.”
As I commented at the time, that’s very much, and almost comically, an *intellectual’s* characterisation.
Yes, that last comment is a recurring issue with all embodied / lived philosophies of life or world-views:
Once you start talking about them (with words) you are dealing intellectually with concepts etc, the “pre-conceptual” nature of the embodied is lost.
Actually, that’s a decent description of Heidegger. You do feel his concepts and language – aletheia, in-der-Welt-sein, sorge, zuhandenheit – all rich and infuriatingly elusive – straining to achieve something that is perhaps beyond the capabilities of either. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen (this can be sung to the tune of ‘Good King Wenceslas’). Well, Perhaps. But we can acknowledge it.
I can believe that. Recognise lots of the terms, but he’s another I’ve not read first-hand (yet). He certainly kept cropping-up as references.