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19 Oct 09

Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy (e-text)

birth of tragedy english translation

records.viu.ca/...tragedy_all.htm - Preview

nietzsche tragedy onlintexts pessimism apollo dionysus strife original_text lecture2 creativity phd

not necessarily a bull exactly,

but in any event a new problem; today I would state that it was the problem

of science itself—science for the first time grasped as problematic,

as dubious.
I call it something poorly written, ponderous, embarrassing, with

fantastic and confused imagery, sentimental, here and there so saccharine it is

effeminate, uneven in tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely

self-confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance

of evidence
36 more annotations...
- Indeed, what is Dionysian?—This book offers an answer
  
  to that question—a “knowledgeable person” speaks there, the initiate and
  
  disciple of his god
- Where then must tragedy have come from?
  
  Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of
  
  overwhelming fullness? And psychologically speaking, what then is the meaning
  
  of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic art grew, the Dionysian
  
  madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation,
  
  of collapse, of cultural decadence?
- In spite of all “modern ideas” and the
  
  prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the
  
  developing hegemony of reasonableness, of practical and theoretical utilitarianism,
  
  as well as democracy itself, which occurs in the same period, perhaps be a
  
  symptom of failing power, of approaching old age, of physiological exhaustion,
  
  rather than pessimism?
- The preface to Richard Wagner already proposed that
  
  art—and not morality—was the essential metaphysical human
  
  activity; in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive
  
  statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an
  
  aesthetic phenomenon.
  - art = essential metaphysical human activity - on 2009-09-06
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- a philosophy which dares to
  
  place morality itself in the world of phenomena, to subsume it, not merely
  
  under the “visions” (in the sense of some idealistic terminus technicus
  
  [technical end point]) but under “illusions,” as an appearance, delusion,
  
  fallacy, interpretation, something made up, a work of art
- there is nothing
  
  which stands in greater opposition to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification
  
  of the world,
- than Christian doctrine, which is
  
  and wishes to be merely moralistic and which, with its absolute
  
  standards, beginning, for example, with its truthfulness of God, relegates art,
  
  every art, to the realm of lies—in other words, which denies art,
  
  condemns it, and passes sentence on it.
- always perceived also something hostile to life, the wrathful,
  
  vengeful aversion to life itself; for all life rests on appearance, art,
  
  illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error. Christianity was from
  
  the start essentially and thoroughly life’s disgust and weariness with life,
  
  which only dressed itself up with, only hid itself in, only decorated itself
  
  with the belief in an “other” or “better” life. The hatred of the “world,” the
  
  curse against the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond
  
  created so that the world on this side might be more easily slandered, at
  
  bottom a longing for nothingness, for extinction,
  - Christianity's desire for "otherworldliness" is at heart pure life negation; it is a sickness. Suicidal. - on 2009-09-06
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- What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words, I baptized it,
  
  taking some liberties— for who knew the correct name of the Antichrist?—after
  
  the name of a Greek god: I called it the Dionysian.—
- and thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile; the tragic spirit
  
  consists of that insight—it leads therefore to resignation”
  - (Schopenhauer) - on 2009-09-06
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- I regret that I tied myself to hopes where there
  
  was nothing to hope for, where everything indicated all too clearly an end
  
  point! That, on the basis of the most recent German music, I began to tell
  
  stories of the “German character,” as if that character might be just about to
  
  discover itself, to find itself again—and that at a time when the German
  
  spirit, which not so long before still had the desire to rule Europe and the
  
  power to assume leadership of Europe,
  - against the German spirit, regretting his error of youth to believe that the "Germans" had any sort of splendour in them. (cp. I am the last anti-political German; the Germans are stupid and vulgar, passim.) - on 2009-09-06
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- I then spoiled my first book for myself, the great
  
  Dionysian question mark still remains as it is set out there, also in relation
  
  to music: How would one have to create a music which is no longer Romantic in
  
  origin, like the German—but Dionysian?
  - Xenakis, Ais, here? Possibly. Certainly not romantic. - on 2009-09-06
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- But, my dear sir, what in all the world is Romantic if
  
  your book is not? Can the deep hatred against “modernism,” “reality,”
  
  and “modern ideas” go any further than it does in your artists’ metaphysics—
  
  which would sooner still believe in nothingness or the devil than in the “here
  
  and now”?
  - Raises own possible objections; aware of obvious contra-claims. - on 2009-09-06
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- Would it not be necessary that the
  
  tragic man of this culture, having trained himself for what is serious and frightening,
  
  desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, the tragedy, as
  
  his own personal Helen of Troy, and to have to cry out with Faust:
  
  With my desire’s power, should I not call
  
  Into this life the fairest form of all?*
  
  “Would it not be necessary?” . . . No, three
  
  times no! You young Romantics: it should not be necessary!
- No! You
  
  should first learn the art of consolation in this life—you should learn to
  
  laugh, my young friends, even if you wish to remain thoroughly pessimistic.
  
  From that, as laughing people, some day or other perhaps you will for once ship
  
  all metaphysical consolation to the devil—and then away with metaphysics!
  - Ihr hoeheren Menschen, lernt mir - LACHEN. - on 2009-09-06
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- the further development of
  
  art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
  
  just as reproduction similarly depends upon the duality of the sexes, their
  
  continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation.
- With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we
  
  establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast,
  
  in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the Apollonian, and the
  
  non-visual art of music, the Dionysian
- this pair, finally produce Attic tragedy, as much a
  
  Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
- The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in
  
  whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of all
  
  plastic art, and also, in fact, as we shall see, an important part of poetry.
  - dreams = precondition of plastic art & poetry - on 2009-09-06
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- he looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from
  
  these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life
  - life is a creation, a creative act, insofar as it is an interpretation (not all art is high art, not all lives are "high lives"?) - on 2009-09-06
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- from these events he
  
  rehearses his life for himself.
- There are people who,
  
  from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away
  
  from such phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,” with a sense of their
  
  own health. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly
  
  and ghost-like this very “health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of
  
  the Dionysian throng roars past them.
- If someone were to transform
  
  Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination
  
  when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come
  
  close to the Dionysian. Now the slave a free man; now all the stiff, hostile
  
  barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or
  
  “saucy fashion” have established between men.
- The finest clay, the most expensive
  
  marble—man—is here worked and hewn, and the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries
  
  rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down,
  
  you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”
- seeks to abolish the individual and to redeem him through a mystical
  
  feeling of collective unity
  - abolish the individual, establish collective unity - on 2009-09-07
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- ne cannot go wrong in assuming
  
  that, to the shame all those born later, their dreams also had a logical
  
  causality of lines and circumferences, colours, and groupings, a sequence of
  
  scenes rather like their best bas reliefs, whose perfection would certainly
  
  entitle us, if such a comparison were possible, to describe the dreaming Greek
  
  man as Homer and Homer as a dreaming Greek man, in a deeper sense than when
  
  modern man, with respect to his dreams, has the temerity to compare himself
  
  with Shakespeare.
  - greek dreams had logical causality; comparison to Shakespeare (unfavourable) - on 2009-09-07
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- Almost everywhere, the
  
  central point of these celebrations consisted of an exuberant sexual
  
  promiscuity, whose waves flooded over all established family practices and its
  
  traditional laws.
- In these Greek festivals, for the first time nature
  
  achieves its artistic jubilee. In them, for the first time, the tearing apart
  
  of the principii individuationis [the principle of individuation]
  
  becomes an artistic phenomenon.
- of that phenomenon that pain awakens joy, that the jubilation
  
  in his chest rips out cries of agony.
- It kept at a careful distance, as
  
  something un-Apollonian, the particular element which constitutes the character
  
  of Dionysian music and, along with that, of music generally, the emotionally
  
  disturbing tonal power, the unified stream of melody, and the totally
  
  incomparable world of harmony.
  - need to find if this apples to Xenakis. - on 2009-09-06
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- To grasp
  
  this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, man must already have attained
  
  that high level of freedom from the self which desires to express itself
  
  symbolically in those forces.
- With an amazement
  
  which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all this might not be
  
  really so foreign to him, that, in fact, his Apollonian consciousness was, like
  
  a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him
  - dionysian unleashing desires; symbolic of high level of freedom from the self... how can the apollonian greek have reacted... - on 2009-09-07
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- The same drive which made itself
  
  sensuously perceptible in Apollo gave birth to that entire Olympian world in
  
  general, and, in this sense, we are entitled to value Apollo as the father of
  
  that world
- In the same manner the Greeks expressed this joyful
  
  necessity of the dream experience in their Apollo. Apollo, as the god of all
  
  the plastic arts, is at the same time the god of prophecy.
- This sublime metaphysical
  
  delusion is instinctually part of science and leads it over and over again to
  
  its limits, at which point it must turn into art, something which is really
  
  predictable with this mechanical process.
- With the torch of this idea, let’s now look at
  
  Socrates: to us he appears as the first person who was capable not only of
  
  living by that instinct for science, but also—something much more—of dying by
  
  it, and thus the picture of the dying Socrates as a man raised above
  
  fear of death by knowledge and reason is the shield hanging over the
  
  entranceway to science

26 Sep 09

The Nietzsche Channel: Nietzsche: Correspondents

thenietzschechannel.fws1.com/corresp.htm - Preview

nietzsche correspondence bg_info biography bg phd

Cosima—who left him for Wagner.
- because von Buelow had abused her, it should be said. He sounds like he was a dick anyway. - on 2009-01-31
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close friend for years, Gast was the one person who was able to decipher Nietzsche's handwriting and worked for Elisabeth Nietzsche in the Nietzsche Archive from 1900-1908.
2 more annotations...
- Her suppression, destruction and revisions of Nietzsche's writings were finally exposed in the 1930s
  - it should be noted that apart from her falsifications, we also OWE to her that she so diligently archived most of his stuff, and that she falsified so very little. She did work tirelessly and NOT ONLY to make his philosophy palatable to the nazis, but also to have the world appreciate the work of her brother. - on 2009-01-31
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- on how he liked these “psychological observations” and their seven-year friendship began.

25 Sep 09

Why Use Moodle?

clt.lse.ac.uk/Why-Use-VLE.php - Preview

The use of VLEs is widespread throughout the School. In 2007-2008, there were about 400 courses using a VLE.
LSE recently finished replacing the previously supported VLE (WebCT) with Moodle, so if you were previously a user of WebCT and would like to start using Moodle please get in contact and we can help get you started. If you'd like to know more about the move from WebCT to Moodle see " The Move from WebCT to Moodle".

16 Sep 09

The Ed Techie: The long-awaited 'education as fruit' metaphor

the education as fruit metaphor. Used to be all abt apples, now we're thinking of the whole fruit salad.

nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/...ucation-as-fruit-metaphor.html - Preview

fruit education metaphor variety difference blog work

Current higher education is about selling apples (the basic undergrad course). We have different types of apples, and they vary slightly in size, colour and taste. But it is still just apples.
As a party host I can create my own fruit offering, just as an educator I can create a 'course' on any subject I want by mixing together resources, tools and adding in my own elements.

06 Sep 09

Madison (background) - Coping with Nietzsche's Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer

www.focusing.org/...madison2.html - Preview

nietzsche heidegger philosophy metaphysics derrida gadamer rorty postmodernism lecture2 creativity tragedy phd

- can we have some references here? - on 2009-09-06
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For us who today read Nietzsche after Heidegger, Nietzsche symbolizes the end of
metaphysics (the death not only of "God" but also, as a necessary consequence, of
the human "subject").
52 more annotations...
- We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its
  manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back ["joyful," as
  Nietzsche would say] pluralism of the postmodern, that heterogeneous range of
  life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and
  legitimate itself....Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical
  claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.
  - T. Eagleton - on 2009-09-06
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- - N makes us question the legimitacy of the trad "philosophical enterprise" - truth being its holy grail (but needn't be, even oughtn't: it's thinking, which we still don' t do etc?) - on 2009-09-06
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- (true heirs to Parmenides and Pythagoras,
  present-day physicists are currently expending a great deal of money and energy in
  search of what they call the Theory of Everything, "a single equation that describes the
  entire universe")
- Modern philosophy can be said to have begun when, bedazzled by this
  new development, philosophers took the new science as the supreme model of genuine,
  foundational knowledge.
- "It is still a metaphysical faith that
  underlies our faith in science--and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and
  anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a
  faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth,
  that truth is divine."
  - compare retrospective foreword to birth of T, "What I managed to seize upon at that time, something fearful and dangerous, was a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any event a new problem; today I would state that it was the problem of science itself—science for the first time grasped as problematic, as dubious." - on 2009-09-06
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- In other words, as Nietzsche would say, when the value of (representational) truth is
  called into question, everything becomes (mere) interpretation ("There is only
  a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'").
- - comparing twilight of idols to Baudrillard's phases of the image (reflecting, masking, perverting, lying about reality, becoming pure simulacrum) - on 2009-09-06
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- When the "real world" at last becomes a myth, a simulacrum, we are witnessing the
  death not only of Truth and of Science, but also of Philosophy itself. At least
  Philosophy with a capital P, as Rorty would say.
- have sought to cope with Nietzsche's legacy, each in his
  own quite distinctive way.
  - what is there to cope with, you big decadent nihilist?! - on 2009-09-06
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- Indeed, in the
  light-hearted joyfulness of his new-found philosophical innocence, he has wholeheartedly
  embraced Nietzsche's pronouncements about the demise of Truth.
- Not
  Socrates' "Don't tell a lie," but Johnny Carson's "Don't be boring" seems to have become
  Rorty's watchword.
  - cp Heidegger on being "interessant" (inter-esse) - on 2009-09-06
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- What is liberating and exhilarating about the book is the way in which it was able to
  open the eyes of so many people to the utter bankrupcy of traditional, foundationalist
  philosophizing. European philosophers (e.g., Derrida) had of course already said much
  the same thing, but Rorty's easy style of writing served to bring the message home with
  great éclat.
- Gadamer himself has characterized
  his philosophizing--hermeneutics--as an attempt to overcome the modes of thought of "the
  epistemological era (l'ère de la théorie de la connaissance)."
- Rorty says that in a post-Philosophical age the attempt to understand things (by
  means of philosophical theory) is passé. The important thing, he says, is to learn how
  to cope.
- it is quite
  another, however, to deny to theory a legitimate and, indeed, central role in the
  formation and sustenance of life practices and socio-political modes of
  being-in-the-world--in other words, their justification or, as Habermas would say much
  to Rorty's displeasure, "legitimation."
- Rorty obviously likes to view himself as a kind of social or culture critic,
  denouncing cruelty and promoting solidarity.
- the best Rorty can do when confronted with "cruelty" is to express
  his personal distaste for it by not admitting cruel people to his own comfy club of "we
  postmodernist bourgeois liberals," i.e., "people who are more afraid of being cruel than
  of anything else."
- What
  right do we have, therefore, to "impose" it on people in other cultures and historical
  circumstances? None, it would seem, since there are no "general principles," only
  historical narrations whose validity (if that's the proper word) is limited to a given
  community at a given time.
  - in one sense it is of course stupid to maintain the "i have no right to stipulate x" - for equally you have every right to stipulate x. Mix Rorty with Arendt's personal ethics (in Responsibility & Judgment) and you have something. - on 2009-09-06
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- Rorty has deconstructed the metaphysical absolutism of the Tradition only to
  land himself in the quagmire of a quite traditional form of ethical relativism.
  - bollocks; it is more complex than merely "quagmire of relativism". Add Nietzsche... - on 2009-09-06
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- Rorty has not so much overcome
  modernism as he has simply abandoned it for its opposite (absolutism for relativism,
  necessity for contingency, [essentialist] universalism for "localism"); he is not so
  much a postfoundationalist as he is a mere antifoundationalist who has
  simply (as Searle would say of Derrida) "turned the world upside down."
  - possibly? - on 2009-09-06
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- Derrida, at
  least, has realized that "metaphysics" is not simply something one can drop at one's
  pleasure, like an old, worn-out pair of shoes, or simply set aside, like a game with
  which one has become bored or a conversation which has gone stale. Like (as some would
  say) Nietzsche himself, Rorty has not succeeded in "overcoming metaphysics"--although he
  has at least managed, willy-nilly, to find a way of coping with the nihilism which, as
  Nietzsche pointed out, tends inevitably to follow upon the overthrowing of metaphysics.
- Derrida is clearly a child of Nietzsche's,
  an heir, as Rorty sees it, to Nietzsche's joyful wisdom who, beyond all metaphyscial
  seriousness, extols the playful "innocence of becoming."
- And yet
  there is a kind of seriousness to the Derridian enterprise that escapes Rorty's notice
  or, to be more precise, that Rorty prefers to ignore, to which he turns a blind eye.
  - eh, obviously. - on 2009-09-06
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- What is referred to as
  "deconstruction" is not a set of theses or beliefs, not even loosely articulated ones
  like those of Rorty, but is simply, so to speak, a method, a way of reading
  texts, philosophical ones in particular.
- The aim of a
  deconstructive reading is to show how texts laying claim to knowledge are full of
  internal tensions and contradictions or antinomies which end up by subverting their
  stated goals and their own claims to truth.
- Derrida's deconstructive undertaking calls into question not only modern philosophy but
  the entire philosophical tradition, or what Derrida calls the "metaphysics of presence."
- This is
- "liberating
  and exhilarating."
- it frees us from the tyranny of two particularly
  insidious notions which, from the beginning, have dominated philosophy: the notions of
  totality and essence.
- invariably leads to the
  suppression of all sorts of loose ends to thing
- oppressive
- totalizing thinking is hazardous
  to human life because it serves to lend philosophical legitimacy to totalitarianism,
  i.e., the totalized society (the socio-political equivalent of the unified science
  dreamed of by modern rationalists).
  - this is a bit noddy... bit simple... - on 2009-09-06
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- Essence" is the grounding notion of philosophical science
- essentialism upholds the rule of the Principle of
  Identity, the cornerstone of logocentrism
  - pace Heidegger... - on 2009-09-06
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- Essentialism provides a handy justification for the tyranny of the status quo
  and of established power structures.
- There is an honesty here
  that one does not find in Rorty who seems to believe that whenever it strikes our fancy
  we can change ourselves overnight by simply inventing new "vocabularies."
- fter having
  deconstructed metaphysics, we are left, in a way similar to Rorty, with an immense
  philosophical void, with, indeed, a kind of nihilism.
  - bollocks. - on 2009-09-06
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- Because (as Derrida rightly perceives) nothing means any one thing
  in particular, he concludes that in the last analysis nothing means anything at all.
- Derrida's rejection of logocentrism is not revolutionary, and because he thinks it
  is, he is unable to take advantage of the sophistication that the debate on essentialist
  thinking has already reached; as a result, he jumps from one extreme (meaning is a
  matter of fixed, immutable concepts) to the other (meaning is a matter of the
  indeterminate, infinite play of signs).
  - this is a somewhat unfair criticism of D, it falls back into a very traditional political thinking "play is all fair and well, but what is to be done, where will we be if we doubt everything, theory *& truth must have their place somewhere" blablabla - on 2009-09-06
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- Carefree and Dionysian though he
  may appear to be, I do not believe that Derrida has succeeded in freeing himself from
  the bad conscience of the metaphysicians.
- Derrida is at least to be
  congratulated on having abandoned the modernist tactic of previous left-wing
  intellectuals who extolled confrontational politics ("revolutionism"), in line with
  Lenin's exhortation to "suppress the suppressors."
- "All beginnings lie in the darkness,
  and what is more, they can be illuminated only in the light of what came later and from
  the perspective of what followed."
- Gadamer has no qualms about
  retelling one of the greatest metanarratives of all time, that of the progressive
  liberation of humankind
- For Gadamer, there is only one thing we can know for
  sure, and that is that any kind of Hegelian absolute is irremediably beyond our grasp.
  "Philosophical thinking," he writes," is not science at all....There is no claim of
  definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: the acknowledgement of the finitude of
  human being in itself."
- In "Text and
  Interpretation" Gadamer writes: "[T]he special feature of historical experience is that
  we stand in the midst of an event without knowing what is happening to us before we
  grasp what has happened in looking backwards. Accordingly, history must be written anew
  by every new present."
- Dissemination and hermeneutics should
  not be contrasted so extremely
- Hermeneutics, I would argue, is as fully "postmodern" as deconstruction. What is
  often overlooked is that there are, in fact, two quite different trends in postmodern
  thinking.
- The first proclaims that modernity is over, that a new age has begun. The new age
  makes use of the past, and of modern achievements, but it has its own new freedoms and
  its own self-definition. The second type of thought is deconstructive, and works to
  undermine the unities and closures found in modernity, without escaping from them into
  some new age.
- "Knowledge," for hermeneutics, is
  nothing other than the shared understanding that a community of inquirers comes to as a
  result of a free exchange of opinions.
- For Gadamer, understanding "is a process of
  communication." In reconceptualizing matters in this way, and in insisting on the
  "communicative" nature of human understanding, hermeneutics offers us something more
  than does deconstruction, i.e., something more than the mere cacophony of everyone's
  parodying, fanciful interpretations of things (the "private fantasies" of Derrida that
  Rorty speaks of).
- Truth is not something simply to be discovered ("represented") but
  something to be made--through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is
  a practical concept. It is something that can exist only if we take
  responsibility for its existence. "Philosophy" is one name for the exercise of this kind
  of responsibility.
- In contrast to the cultural and epistemological relativists, Gadamer
  reminds us that although understanding is inescapably language-bound, "this assertion
  does not lead us into any kind of linguistic relativism." Or any kind of Rortyan
  "ethnocentrism."

Thomas Mann - In Ton und Bild - Hörproben und Tondokumente

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Mann Nietzsche mitleid pity tragedy breakdown lecture2 creativity phd

Thomas Mann über Friedrich Nietzsche

Faszination und innere Verwandtschaft verbanden Thomas Mann mit Friedrich Nietzsche, zum „Einsiedler von Sils Maria“. In diesem Redefragment schildert er sein Verhältnis als eine Mischung von Ehrfurcht und Erbarmen, als tragisches Mitleid mit Nietzsche. Tragisch, weil der Philosoph letztlich an den Gaben seines Denkens zerbrach.
- with audio: “Die Mischung von Ehrfurcht und Erbarmen... es ist das tragische Mitleid mit einer überlasteten, über-beauftragen Seele, welche zum Wissen nur berufen, nicht eigentlich dazu geboren war und, wie Hamlet, daran zerbrach.” - begin lecture with this quote. - on 2009-09-06
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The Nietzsche Channel: The Case of Wagner

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love nietzsche wagner music bizet nature hatred tragedy lecture2 creativity phd

How can one abolish the old society?" Only by declaring war against "contracts" (tradition, morality). This is what Siegfried does.
Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of décadence,—I had reasons. "Good and evil" is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality too,—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life ...
- good & evil mere variation on the more pressing prob of decadence, and decadence is expressed in morality, which negates life - in final instance it is THIS that bothers Nietzsche: life-denial. cp. birth of tragedy preface. - on 2009-09-06
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- My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses.
- "I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music." But I would also understand a philosopher who would declare: "Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian ..."
- or entirely different thoughts are meanwhile running through my head ... Has it been noticed that music liberates the spirit? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician?
- And how soothingly the Moorish dance speaks to us! How even our insatiability for once gets to know satiety in this lascivious melancholy!— Finally love, love translated back into nature! Not the love of a "higher virgin"! No Senta-sentimentality [Senta: the heroine of Wagner's Flying Dutchman.]! But love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely in this a piece of nature! That love which is war in its means, and at bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes!— I know no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, turned into so terrifying a formula, as in Don José's last cry, which concludes the work:
  
  "Yes! I have killed her,
  I—my adored Carmen!"
  
  — Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher—) is rare: it raises a work of art above thousands. For on the average, artists do what all the world does, even worse—they misunderstand love. Wagner, too, misunderstood it . They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another person, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person ... Even God does not constitute an exception at this point. He is far from thinking, "What is it to you if I love you?"—he becomes terrible when one does not love him in return. L'amour—this saying remains true among gods and men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par conséquent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins généreux. (B. Constant.) [Benjamin Constant: Love is of all sentiments the most egoistic, and, as a consequence, when it is wounded, the least generous.]
  - introduce Nietzsche on love & friendship and interpret as per jubilation & joy, but NOT "happiness" (if distinction can be finely drawn - on 2009-09-06
  - Love is not sentimental and it is selfish, must be selfish. selfless love is stooopid... - on 2009-09-06
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- Finally love, love translated back into nature! Not the love of a "higher virgin"! No Senta-sentimentality [Senta: the heroine of Wagner's Flying Dutchman.]! But love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely in this a piece of nature! That love which is war in its means, and at bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes!
  - he he he, good one, Fritz. - on 2009-09-06
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- he return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!—
- Goethe once asked himself what danger threatened all romantics: the fatality of romanticism. His answer was: "suffocating of the rumination of moral and religious absurdities."
  - Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche himself... :-) - on 2009-09-06
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- "Whence comes all misfortune in the world?" Wagner asked himself. From "old contracts," he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists.
- How can one abolish the old society?" Only by declaring war against "contracts" (tradition, morality). This is what Siegfried does.
- It is not the saga but Wagner who invented this radical trait; at this point he revised the saga
- Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities. But his main enterprise aims to emancipate woman—"to redeem Brunhilde"
- The ship struck a reef; Wagner was stuck. The reef was Schopenhauer's philosophy;
  - Wagner - epic FAIL. - on 2009-09-06
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- Finally, a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he was shipwrecked, what if he interpreted it as the goal, as the secret intent, as the true significance of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here—that was a goal, too. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci [When I suffer shipwreck, I have navigated well]
- Brunhilde was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of free love, putting off the world with the hope for a socialist utopia in which "all turns out well," but now gets something else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to transpose the fourth book of "The World as Will and Representation" into verse. Wagner was redeemed ... In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Schopenhauer conferred on Wagner is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of décadence gave to the artist of décadence himself
- Wagner was redeemed ... In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Schopenhauer conferred on Wagner is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of décadence gave to the artist of décadence himself
- To the artist of décadence—there we have the crucial words. And here my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on guilelessly while this décadent corrupts our health—and music as well! Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches,—he has made music sick —
- s Wagner a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches,—he has made music sick —
- That people in Germany should deceive themselves about Wagner does not surprise me. The opposite would surprise me. The Germans have constructed a Wagner for themselves whom they can revere: they have never been psychologists, their gratitude consists in misunderstanding
  - despicable, dull, overly sentimental Germans. Nietzsche's works, passim. - on 2009-09-06
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- Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant!
- I place this point of view at the outset: Wagner's art is sick.
- In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner,—the three great stimulantia of the exhausted, the brutal, the artificial and the innocent (idiotic).
- For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.— What is the sign of every literary décadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole.

nietzsche, Geburt der Tragoedie

Geburt der Tragoedie; Nietzsche

www.projekt.gutenberg.de/?id=5&xid=1955&kapitel=1 - Preview

tragedy philology critique music nietzsche onlinetexts lecture2 creativity phd

Bereits im Vorwort an Richard Wagner wird die Kunst - und nicht die Moral - als die eigentlich metaphysische Thätigkeit des Menschen hingestellt;
- in english eigentlich translated with "essential", not authentic... - on 2009-09-06
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Gegen die Moral also kehrte sich damals, mit diesem fragwürdigen Buche, mein Instinkt, als ein fürsprechender Instinkt des Lebens, und erfand sich eine grundsätzliche Gegenlehre und Gegenwerthung des Lebens, eine rein artistische, eine antichristliche. Wie sie nennen ? Als Philologe und Mensch der Worte taufte ich sie, nicht ohne einige Freiheit - denn wer wüsste den rechten Namen des Antichrist? - auf den Namen eines griechischen Gottes: ich hiess sie die dionysische.

07 Aug 09

The future of Iranian feminism - signandsight

Shadi Sadr, an Iranian feminist and human rights activist working as a lawyer and journalist, was released from prison on bail last Tuesday for the equivalent of more than 36,000 Euros.

www.signandsight.com/...1909.html - Preview

politics iran signandsight feminism

One possible reason for her arrest is recent article titled "What Is to Be Done", which she posted on her web site, womeniniran.com. In it she presents what amounts to a blueprint for how the women's movement should relate to the overall political movement for change.
Shadi Sadr, an Iranian feminist and human rights activist working as a lawyer and journalist, was released from prison on bail last Tuesday for the equivalent of more than 36,000 Euros.
8 more annotations...
- In the Western media's interpretation of the presidential election and its aftermath, Iran is caught up in the rivalry between political factions within the religious power elite. But irrespective of differences of interest and opinion, none of the factions have openly questioned the Islamic dictatorship as a system.
- Shadi Sadr articulates a third voice which, despite the barbarism of the security forces, was heard loud and clear in the demonstrations and discussions throughout the country in the weeks following the elections.
- One of her arguments addresses the very real threat that the women's struggle will be bypassed if the new social movement succeeds.
- "I believe that this mass movement is a secular, political movement, with the pivotal demand for freedom and democracy, involving a multitude of diversified minutiae and sub-demands. Any connection between the women’s movement and the mass movement should accommodate the discourse of this movement.”
- She argues for a third way, one she calls the "doctrine of reciprocal influx." Shadi believes that the women's movement has endured by building social networks that have refused to be silenced or intimidated.
- Thus the relationship between the movement and the more general demands remained vague and did not go beyond slogans, and this was not necessarily negative… But now, in the wake of recent events, it is unthinkable that we continue sitting on the fence. In fact, the popular potential and political necessity make it imperative that the struggle for women’s rights is grafted to the general demands. Just as we work adamantly for the right to divorce, or the veil to be voluntary, our strategy must reflect our understanding that without the freedom of expression, the freedom of organisation and assembly, the rights of women cannot not be achieved.”
- he independence of the women's movement in theory and practice, Shadi argues, should be maintained to forestall the sidelining of women's rights in similar political movements elsewhere in the world.
  - compare backlash against harman recently on grounds that she believes there need be many more women representatives in politics: an argument against her was that she was silly because at the moment, the economic crisis means that all feminist or other "trivial issues" must take backseat. They're always the first to go, that and children's rights. - on 2009-08-07
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- One of the factors that may have contributed to the
  release of Shadi Sadr was a letter of protest to the Iranian government by the German Foreign minister. In case she is made to stand trial or arrested again, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his EU counterparts should take joint action to see that she is realeased.

03 Aug 09

Lecture Capture: No Longer Optional? -- Campus Technology

www.campustechnology.com/...apture-No-Longer-Optional.aspx - Preview

lecture capture research work

20 Jul 09

Supporting researchers - CLT wiki

elearning.lse.ac.uk/...Supporting_researchers - Preview

work LSE minutes tasks

Should CLT support researchers?
4 more annotations...
- ging, wikis, social bookmarking etc) are particularly useful and are great crossover tools, i.e. effective for personal learning, personal research & collaboration but also for teaching (collaborative learning). Extending current development activities to researchers, even to the extent
- raining
  Existing courses, but extend remit and advertise differently to encourage research community
- Wikis for collaborative work
  advice on using external systems like Wetpaint
  provide wiki hosting - note that there is a desire in some quarters for an LSE-native system that could be used for sensitive or confidential data with confidence and assurance that the data was subject to UK law only.
- Delicious
  advice and promotion

16 Jul 09

apophenia: I want my cyborg life

www.zephoria.org/...i_want_my_cybor.html - Preview

to try to grok what on earth he was talking about
- grok means to get the meanign of something - on 2009-07-16
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ut, of course, the attack was not actually about the reality of my internet habits but the perception of them. There's no doubt that, when given a laptop in a lecture setting, most people surf the web, check email, or play video games. Their attention is lost and they've checked out. Of course, there's an assumption that technology is to blame. The only thing that I really blame said technology for is limiting doodling practice for the potential future artist (and for those of us who still can't sketch to save our lives). Y'see - I don't think that people were paying that much attention before. Daydreaming and sketching (aka "taking notes") are not particularly new practices. Now the daydreamer might just be blogging instead.
2 more annotations...
- I can't pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. And, in my world, every meeting and talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication.
- Let the speaker do her/his thing... let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I'm inspired, I ask questions. When I'm not, I zone out, computer or not.

07 Jul 09

Making It Personal

web-dev-csc.gre.ac.uk/...index.php - Preview

personalised learning work

The appropriate and selective use of a range of learning technologies contributes significantly to the personalised learning agenda (Underwood, 2007).
The appropriate and selective use of a range of learning technologies contributes significantly to the personalised learning agenda (Underwood, 2007).
3 more annotations...
- The personalising of learning is a journey towards full learner customization and autonomy.
- Are personalisation technologies an enabling or disruptive influence on learning and teaching?
- How desirable or achievable is personalisation and might it lead to greater inequality amongst students?

06 Jun 09

Misery. It's Gordon Brown as Kathy Bates. And Westminster as Lilliput | Marina Hyde | Comment is free | The Guardian

Marina Hyde on the shitness of today's westminster/ labour party/ gordon brown is going down.

www.guardian.co.uk/...cabinet-gordon-brown-labour - Preview

guardian

The peculiar irony of New Labour's endgame is that it was all foretold by an accidental prophet named Tony Blair. "My project will be complete," he once declared, "when the Labour party learns to love Peter Mandelson."
virtually the only senior politician of any stature is Peter Mandelson. And yes, just typing those words is such a dementedly surreal feeling that I'm shaking my head in laughter as I do so.

The Question Concerning Social Technology - O'Reilly Radar

very dull, bit up itself

radar.oreilly.com/...uestion-concerning-social.html - Preview

foucault social media

TV Links

www.tv-links.cc - Preview

leisure amusement tv

31 May 09

Cartoon Predicts the Future 50 Years Ago

www.infowars.com/edicts-the-future-50-years-ago - Preview

27 May 09

Language Log » The linguistic roots of the Sri Lankan civil war

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll - Preview

In the coverage of the civil war in Sri Lanka, I haven't seen much discussion of its linguistic aspects. In particular, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 was a key event, whose causes and consequences are worth considering.
Both groups, in the main, enjoyed cordial relations for more than 2,000 years. Then, in the 1950s the Sinhalese abandoned the movement to make both Sinhala and Tamil the country's official language and instead instituted Sinhala as its sole official language.
4 more annotations...
- A mob representing the latter attacked the Tamil protesters and was responsible for unleashing riots that killed nearly 150 Tamils. […] Tamil leaders characterized the Sinhala-Only Act as a form of "apartheid,"…
- However, this seems to have too little and too late, especially given the uncertain meaning and apparently erratic implementation of articles 18 and 19. So the Thirteenth Amendment, certified 11/14/1987, four years after open civil war broke out in 1983, said that
- (2) Tamil shall also be an official language.
- By that time, however, it was far too late to end the civil war by making concessions on linguistic issues.

05 May 09

TED - Ideas worth spreading « Blog « WordPress.com

about TED - useful description

en.blog.wordpress.com/...ted-ideas-worth-spreading - Preview

TED

30 Apr 09

Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/arendt - Preview

Arendt encyclopedia

She completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled
Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (hereafter LA) under Jaspers's
supervision in 1929. She was forced to flee Germany in 1933 as a
result of Hitler's rise to power, and after a brief stay in Prague and
Geneva she moved to Paris where for six years (1933–39) she worked for
a number of Jewish refugee organisations
In 1951 she published The Origins of
Totalitarianism (hereafter OT), a major study of the Nazi and
Stalinist regimes that soon became a classic, followed by The
Human Condition in 1958 (hereafter HC), her most important
philosophical work.
7 more annotations...
- Arendt's political thought cannot, in this sense, be identified either
  with the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of
  its critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the
  satisfaction of individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate
  individuals around a shared conception of the good.
- If
  there is a tradition of thought with which Arendt can be identified,
  it is the classical tradition of civic republicanism originating in
  Aristotle and embodied in the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu,
  Jefferson, and Tocqueville.
- modernity is characterized by the loss of the
  world,
- Modernity
  is the age of mass society,
- and of the
  victory of animal laborans over homo faber
- The hermeneutic strategy that Arendt employed to re-establish a link
  with the past is indebted to both Walter Benjamin and Martin
  Heidegger.
- From Benjamin she took the idea of a fragmentary
  historiography, one that seeks to identify the moments of rupture,
  displacement and dislocation in history. Such fragmentary
  historiography enables one to recover the lost potentials of the past
  in the hope that they may find actualization in the present. From
  Heidegger she took the idea of a deconstructive reading of the Western
  philosophical tradition, one that seeks to uncover the original
  meaning of our categories and to liberate them from the distorting
  incrustations of tradition.

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