well we discussed that and decided that we should keep the blade form and style but extend the grip area… for ergonomic reasons. the blade is a bit top heavy given its sudden taper, resulting in reduced speed when it is used one handed. instead of redesigning the blade we’ll make it an optional two handed sword. we want to keep the blade design because it’s concentrated top weight increases its force of impact.
Granted, it’s no akinaka or shamshir obviously, but not a bad sword overall for the intermediate swordsman.
God, i feel so fuckin’ cultured just reading this. I want to be in a castle or manor somewhere, looking out the window while the sportsmen are playing cricket…Where is my tea?
i’ve thought about that before when imagining what I would have done if I were hitler. first of all i wouldn’t have even considered exterminating people because it wouldn’t have been necessary. if i unwittingly believed a bunch of pseudo-scientific anthropological nonsense about races then yeah, i might do it, but i probably wouldn’t. what i would have done was either indoctrinate people X or imprison people X in indoctrination camps if they couldn’t be indoctrinated (a bit redundant, I know). i would have complete control over the media. everywhere you looked there would be a picture of me on a balcony in a uniform looking resolutely up and to the left a little, toward a brilliant sun setting behind a majestic mountain. there would be some kind of quote of something profound that I’ve said in medieval font. i would win people X’s admiration, love and respect, see. none of this would be forced.
anyway, in the first case people X would be working voluntarily toward the war effort, in the second, against their will toward the war effort. in either case everybody gets to live and everybody does what I say. bada bing, bada boom.
Yes, I doubt he was referring to anything north of the Alps.
Perhaps. On the other hand, perhaps S was incapable because of his milieu, which was after all not that of Montaigne.
Further on in that aphorism, Nietzsche calls Montaigne Shakespeare’s model or example (Vorbild); and in a notebook entry, he explicitly says that Shakespeare was the completer or perfecter (Vollender) of “the free-spiritry of Montaigne”–like Dante was of the Catholic Church and Wagner of the Romantic movement–, and implicitly that he was “subjected” or “subordinated” (unterworfen) to that “great spiritual movement”–that is, said free-spiritry–, and not its “leader”–also like Dante and Wagner (Sommer-Herbst 1884 26 [42]).
Further on in that note, he speaks of “[t]he higher forms, where the artist is only part of the man–e.g., Plato, Goethe, [and] G. Bruno”, and says that “[t]hese forms seldom succeed [or: “turn out well”]”. Now Lampert shows that Montaigne greatly influenced the Machiavellians Bacon and Descartes (Nietzsche and Modern Times); we may regard him as the intermediary Machiavellian, and thereby as one of the philosopher-kings who commanded and legislated the advent of Modernity. Plato, of course, was the same for the advent of Platonism (or: how philosophy became Socratic).
If Bacon was indeed the Shakespeare poet, then “Shakespeare” was such a successful higher form after all. Bacon was in any case: his command of language, like Plato’s, was not outranked by any poet. The great philosophers are the greatest commanders of language. This rule is one more argument in support of Nietzsche’s claim that Hegel was no genuine philosopher (BGE 211). Then again, they may not always seem great commanders of language; their exoteric style often sounds a bit strained–or, conversely, a bit “woolly”.
Actually, the passage in question does not name him as an example of the highest type. Literally, it says:
[size=95]“The highest man would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly, one finds the instincts that mightily drive against each other (e.g., Shakespeare), but restrained.” (WP 966 (1884).)[/size]
So Shakespeare is only named as an example of where the plant man shows itself strongly, not where it shows itself the most strongly.
Good read, though. Thanks for that link.
Isn’t that a linear, indeed progressive view of time? Isn’t the truth rather that things become more concentrated–or, more aptly, more Classical–up to a point, which is the high point of the cycle, after which they become over-refined (Baroque) and then more and more disintegrated (Rococo)? Also, Moody wrote:
[size=95]“In Britain, the time of Shakespeare was replete with an overflowing of great poets and playwrights of whom Shakespeare was just considered one at the time - that’s how high the level of quality was!
Likewise, the Athens of Ancient Greece produced a surfeit of great sculptors and playwrights.
Both England and Athens have not produced anything as great as that in the intervening centuries.
You will find that most cultures exhibit this periodicity.”[/size]
Well, I’m not sure Fixed can read German as a native can; I think probably rather as Nietzsche could read Shakespeare. And I, too, find it hard to read Shakespeare–no easier than the German of that time, Opitz for example. Also, the literary medium is different: even TSZ, for example, is for the most part not poetry, whereas I don’t know of any prose writings by Shakespeare–even if they exist, surely you wouldn’t want me to compare them with Nietzsche’s, and Nietzsche’s poems with Shakespeare’s. And even then the genres are very different.
He is. But these are literary, not philosophical considerations. Thus Nietzsche, when his publisher complained about his phrasing, exclaimed in a letter: “What does the writer of Zarathustra have to do with phrasing!” (From heart; possibly paraphrased.) He also said that improving the style means improving the thought–the idea–and nothing besides. I’m concerned with ideas, and indeed prefer the styles of those whose ideas interest me more. I’m therefore proud enough not to find Shakespeare very accessible:
[size=95]“It is not lightly possible to understand strange blood: I hate the reading idlers.” (TSZ, "Of Reading and Writing.)[/size]
This post is to nobody in particular but does have some relevance to this idea that philosophers are great in the usual sense that they are believed to be. That their ideas are responsible for the course history has taken.
There is a problem with narrowing down to the known causes the reasons why we believe ideology determines the material relations of people. This is happening here; we create a narrative that links events into an order that we interpret as the result of a set of distinguished ideas guiding the development of what we are interpreting. So we say that the ideology and the system we are observing is the result of the guidance of a few specific, fundamental ideas… and we then attribute this to the great thinkers. In fact the reverse is happening. In a Hegelian dialectical way the problems recognized by thinkers are already undergoing synthesis, and only the fewest causes are accounted for by the thinkers. The process is overdetermined, meaning, the sufficient conditions for change are already present and working despite what thinkers and philosophers are doing. Philosophers then aren’t guiding this process but right behind it, intrepreting it.
Imagine being able to place every major philosopher’s system of thought on a timeline in which each one will necessarily appear at the approximate moment it does… as an expression of some ideological interpretation of some present condition. In that case, consciousness is indeed epiphenomenal as Marx described it and philosophers really are only interpreting the world.
The greatness of a thinker is to be able to create theoretical circumstances that if put in place will solve some perceived problem. When he does this he reflects the rational, dialectical process. When he doesn’t he’s just idling. Of course all of this is enormously bias and assumes historical materialism is the only complete system of thought.
But how does that affect your understanding of what a philosopher is? In a nut shell you have the following premises:
Consciousness is epiphenomenal and cannot be a cause (that is, our ‘thinking with words’ cannot cause anything in the world).
Philosophical thinking is either purely reflective and tautological or it is an active reflection of some necessary stage in the development of some overdetermined effect.
Philosophers are results, not causes.
The philosophical post-structural stage history is now in is the stage in which it is forced to examine itself analytically; its narrative has maxed out (and it is no coincidence that global socialism is around the corner- it reflects analogously this stage in philosophy) and the differences between philosophy and the natural sciences are clearer than ever. Hundreds of years ago, not so much, hence the predominant activity of metaphysical thinking at that time.
That branch of philosophy refered to as ‘ordinary language philosophy’ specializes in pointing this aspect of philosophy out. Today, because philosophy has reached maximum capacity and language in its fundamental grammatical form has long since established itself, nothing new is possible with/in it. Hence, it turns the examination on itself. Why W says the task of philosophy is to clear up its history of errors.
That analogy I used. Socialism’s language will be the result of and directly reflect the condensation and economization of language in general… while the free market stage was analogous to the experimental, metaphysical (poetic) stage in language and philosophy. The industrial revolution necessarily produced a revolution of ideas. Stages folks. Technocratic minimalism could be next and the fate of your language hangs in the balance.
The part about my grandfather is right, the other is not - we’ve seen pictures and letters of them since and they were a rather wild bunch, dwelling half naked on the beaches of the North Sea. And certainly no one went willingly on the trains, that was also never part of our story - the Gestapo and SS were just pretty compelling arguments. Watch Polanski’s “The Pianist” - if youre up for some unpleasant impositions. The issue on the train was simply that they were afraid to let my grandfather escape because it would put their own lives directly in danger. They chose to wait it out because they could not imagine what they were heading towards.
My grandfather simply had more imagination.
Don’t forget I stem from the Great Gaon R, anything but a pious man, a great irreverent magician of the North. My mother didn’t come along with my father because he was so “good”. He was rather strikingly rugged and deep, going on a crazy adventure and asking her along.
The capacity for obedience as blind following is absent in both my family lines. I could never be what I am if I had even an ounce of slaveblood running through me.
What separates the Hebrews from the religions derived from their will; Diciplined tradition is not the same as belief. The Isrealites were always out for Earthly power. Their certainty that they would have it is the measure of their will.
There is no Jewish afterlife. There is only progeny.
The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews, thus making them co-victims in a Forgotten Holocaust. This Holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms–namely, as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to the Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known. Little wonder that many people who experienced these events share the feeling of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who anxious when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities. – Richard C. Lukas, preface to The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944
Watch The Pianist or watch Schindler’s List, they deal exclusively with the Jews as the victims. I do not recollect there was any reference to the millions of non Jews who met their deaths in these concentration camps. There is this tendency to portray the Jews as the only victims of the Holocaust and that in itself is wrong. There were many millions who were murdered based purely on their race, religion or even sexual orientation.
What is forgotten or purposely overlooked is that the Holocaust was about the slaughter of both Jews and Gentiles.
Actually, I realise now that it’s not even saying that much. What it does is, it names Shakespeare as an example of where instincts run strongly counter to each other–not even of where they are nevertheless restrained…
On the other hand, WP 848 (1887) definitely seems to say Shakespeare was classical; that, if he was really Lord Bacon, he was classical even while being a moral monster–possessing great moral loftiness (Bacon) while at the same time possessing immorality of the same level (Shakespeare).
That surely must have been wild for women back then. Maybe even for men.
I definitely didn’t mean it in the sense of “willing and eager”. I suppose it wasn’t the right word. “Reluctantly” may be what I should have said.
But what about that thing I said about God? Did I get my information that wrong?
I never meant to suggest that your father was naturally pious. The fact that he didn’t marry a Jewess already attests to this, after all.
Well, that seems a bit hyperbolic. Even if your bloodline was not affected by the race mixing following the French Revolution, there’s still the issue of dominant and recessive traits (though it could be argued that “master traits”, like blond hair and blue eyes, tend to be recessive). In any case, it sounds like Nietzsche near the brink of madness, yet without what he immediately adds:
[size=95]“I am a Polish nobleman pur sang, with whom not even a drop of bad blood has been thrown into the mix, least of all German blood. When I look for the deepest antithesis to myself, the incalculable baseness of instincts, I always find my mother and sister,—to believe myself related to such canaille would be a blasphemy against my divinity. […] One is related least of all to one’s parents: it would be the uttermost sign of baseness to be related to one’s parents.” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise”, section 3.)[/size]
Well, what about Sheol? And is not “only progeny” proletarian?
Do you think Drury’s esoteric reading of Strauss is incorrect? Or that Strauss was lying esoterically (and then perhaps not even exoterically)? Do you think the Jews, as a rule, have not been naturally pious people at all, but only pretended to be so for the sake of power over those they succesfully deceived thereby?
Even so, I’m reminded of something I wrote seven years ago (and translated last year):
[size=95] "Once upon a time, the people with the strongest unconcealed will to power were in power.
Then, people who possessed this unconcealed will to power to a lesser degree carried through a revaluation.
The latter thought up a moral world order that did not correspond to the natural world order (in which the former were in power).
By means of this revaluation, the latter came to power.
Until the latter were unconcealably powerful--and dared to express their will to power unconcealedly.
Now the latter even have poets who unvarnishedly praise their power and will to power. [I was thinking of you here!]
But the basis of their power is concealed will to power. As soon as this is revealed, it cannot be the basis of new power anymore (for deception was its greatest strength)."[/size]
For a very long time, the Israelites have not been out for worldly power overtly. Even now they still have (to pretend) to believe they have a right to their land other than might (i.e., a natural, not just a positive right). Which may be why they still don’t have their temple back.
::
The Jews of Mainz certainly were not slaves:
[size=95]“The women girded their loins with strength and killed their own sons and daughters and then themselves. Many men also mustered their strength and slaughtered their wives and children and infants. The most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of her delight. They all arose, man and woman alike, and killed one another. The young maidens, the brides, and the bridegrooms looked out through the windows and cried out in a loud voice: ‘Look and behold, O Lord, what we are doing to sanctify Thy Great Name, in order not to exchange You for a despicable crucified abomination, a bastard son of a whore.’” (Solomon bar Simson, Chronicle of the First Crusade.)[/size]
Perhaps the only conclusive test for whether one is a master or a slave is when one is given the choice: either slavery or death. I think choosing death means little if one believes one will then go to Heaven, Valhalla, or the like, though.
From Human, All Too Human, in ref. The birth of Christianity - is it possible for a Jew, who believed he was the son of God, …? It’s not only possible, or probable, but it is certain.
Therefore, there is no credible choice.
Why? Because it has happened. …The proof is Overwhelming.
The belief has to be grounded in a guarantee.
The guarantee is beyond the good-evil analogy between slavery and freedom.Slavery in deference to original sin, is within that orb of escape from that idea. Original sin is a vestiture upon the credibility of
enslavement. Freedom, is an escape from the effects of culminative desire’s object. Institution of the object, enslaves and toxifies it, while enslaving it.
Original sin is an unworthy reduction into the hell of unreason.
But a Viking doesn’t “believe” he is going to Valhalla. He is wise to death. Hell, Valhalla promises war not peace, and this gives him delight. The attitude towards death determines if one is a master or slave.
If fighting to the death with Odin and then being revived and feasting with him every day is your idea of Heaven, that may be much greater than if it were a Christian idea (e.g., lying in green pastures with your Shepherd or gloating at the people in Hell). However, if you actually believe in it–and I’m not saying anyone does–, then you don’t really believe in death. It’s like what Nietzsche says about solitude: if you believe in God, you cannot really experience solitude.
[size=95]“Solitude probes most thoroughly, more than any illness proper, whether one is born and predestined for life–or for death, like by far the most.” (Nietzsche, Nachlass.)[/size]
Moody once said death was Zarathustra’s seventh solitude.
This has suggested to me that the most scientific myth of an afterlife may be this:
When you die, you go to a place where there are no others souls. No soul will ever reach you and you will never reach a soul. You will be absolutely alone to all eternity.
Now Sheol seems to be like a primitive version of Hades. According to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, “it is known also as ‘Dumah,’ the abode of silence”. Perhaps the name Aïdes originally simply meant “darkness”, the visual counterpart of silence. Perhaps it primarily referred to the soul’s inability to discern anyone else there.
Hades however came to signify something quite different from a metaphor for death. Thus Benardete writes:
[size=95]“[I]t is [Achilles’] tomb that makes him conspicuous both now and in the future. Achilles dies but not his name. Hades is needed in order that Achilles may enjoy, if only counterfactually, the reality of his name.” (Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre.)[/size]
In Homer, Hades is a place where the dead can hear reports of what is being said about them in the realm of the living, and thereby enjoy the good things and suffer from the bad things. I say whoever actually believes in this doesn’t really believe in death.
He says “highest man”…so how does that not translate into “most strongly”… How could the plant man showing itself most strongly exceed the highest man?
Perhaps there’s a distinction between the Dionysian Shakespeare and Nietzsche, “Dionysus Victorious”
“It is a mere prejudice that I am a human being. Yet I have often enough dwelled among human beings and I know the things human beings experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus — Alexander and Caesar were incarnations of me, as well as the poet of Shakespeare, Lord Bacon. Most recently I was Voltaire and Napoleon, perhaps also Richard Wagner … However, I now come as Dionysus victorious, who will prepare a great festival on Earth … Not as though I had much time … The heavens rejoice to see me here … I also hung on the cross …”
Jews historically make themselves into victims and allow others to become violently displeased with them.
Amongst the diaspora it was always certain that whatever nation they would immigrate into Jews would make coexistence virtually impossible for wherever they were inhabiting. This is why throughout many nations they were expelled historically into exile.
“The highest man (e.g., Shakespeare) would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly, one finds the instincts that drive mightily against each other, but restrained.”
Or thus:
“The highest man would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne (e.g., Shakespeare). Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly, one finds the instincts that drive mightily against each other, but restrained.”
It does not even run thus:
“The highest man would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly (e.g., Shakespeare), one finds the instincts that drive mightily against each other, but restrained.”
Or thus:
“The highest man would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly, one finds the instincts that drive mightily against each other, but restrained (e.g., Shakespeare).”
Instead, it runs thus:
“The highest man would have the greatest plurality of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. Indeed: where the plant man shows itself strongly, one finds the instincts that drive mightily against each other (e.g., Shakespeare), but restrained.”
Thus Shakespeare is here offered as an example of 1) where one finds the instincts that drive mightly against each other; not even of 2) where the plant man shows itself strongly, i.e., where one finds those instincts restrained; let alone of 3) the highest man, i.e., the man with the greatest plurality of drives in the relatively greatest strength that still lets itself be borne. In order to be an example of 3, he would have to have been a Bacon.
