You’re not even going to ask me about my girlfriend?
How cold are you?
Ask what about your girlfriend - how hot she is?
No you idiot! Just casual conversation, you know, stuff like “so what do you like about her,” or “what are your plans with her,” etc., etc.
And of course she’s hot. I will have nothing to do with the ugly ones. I can’t believe you would need to ask me how hot she is. She’s with me, isn’t she? She’s gotta be hot, dude.
I did not grasp that your having a girlfriend was a new development. Does this mean you were still in your midlife crisis during the various discussions we had before your self-imposed exile? If so, this new development has apparently not changed the fact that your awareness of your mortality makes it impossible for you to be a serious participant in philosophical discussions.
I think my crisis is over because I have nothing left to lose except my freedom. My crisis was economical; I was forever worrying about how to pay my bills, but caught in a vicious cycle that never allowed me to make progress. The things I owned owned me, so I got rid of them.
Now I am homeless and I wander around. I am always looking for work, obviously, but I don’t have much faith in ever finding a job that I will be satisfied with, given the conditions of the kind of work I do and the trash that I work for.
If I live much longer, or keep a job, it will be for my girl and/or the family I might produce in a near future.
Well, procreating surely is a way of making oneself live on beyond one’s death. It is one of the two forms of reincarnation that I believe exist. It consists in passing on one’s genetic information. The other consists in passing on one’s intellectual information. Thus Nietzsche’s spirit lives on, though his body does not. The two forms of offspring - one’s brain-children and one’s actual children - may even be rivals, both making demands on one’s limited amount of energy. This explains why Nietzsche said that a married philosopher belongs in comedy: Lady Sophia is every bit as demanding a mistress as any actual wife or mistress.
You, détrop, would, I think, fit very well within a comedy. You may have found, or be on your way to, your authentic existence. In the book “How to Read Heidegger”, by one Mark Wrathall, there is a chapter called “Death and Authenticity”. In it, it says: “Anxiety in the face of death, Heidegger explains, ‘liberates [Dasein] from possibilities which “count for nothing”, and lets [Dasein] become free for those which are authentic’ (Being and Time, p. 395).” Perhaps the possibility of you as a serious philosopher is indeed one which counts for nothing. And this is no disgrace. Indeed, it sounds like a very honest life - an authentic life. To care about the only things that matter before death - and to will the means to take care of them: that does indeed reflect a wisdom, the wisdom for which you may have been seeking.
I don’t agree and would not reproduce for any such reason. I would reproduce so that there is more life. This has nothing to do with me. When I’m dead I’m history.
I don’t believe in reincarnation, nor do I believe that the passing of genetic codes is anything more than a biological process. There is no “spirit” in these codes.
I don’t bother with Heidegger. Heidegger is what’s left after Sartre fixes all the existential mistakes made from bad interpretations of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Comedy is the most sublime form of art because it neutralizes tragedy. Had a fly landed on Napoleon’s nose while he was assessing the battle-field, causing him to swat at it and fall off his horse…I would admire him a hundred times more.
There is no such thing as “serious philosophy.” There is serious science. That is all.
Wait so let me get this straight. You’re a Marxist, but for some reason you do not work because no jobs ‘please’ you and you can’t pay your bills and now you’re basically homeless. Hmm… How ingenious of you! You can take advantages of all the equality that goes into Communism and not even work. I wonder why no one has ever though of this before. Can I be a Marxist with you? =D>
Most of it. To be sure, I have come across references to the Last Man before now, but they were always beyond me. Practically none of it was committed to memory. Reading them now however, I find I understand.
I was using the terms “spirit” and “to live on” metaphorically.
If you just want there to be more life, you can also go and breed frogs. Or bacteria, for that matter.
I never said there was. I said there was spirit in intellectual information, not in genetic information - “spirit” in the Nietzschean sense, of course.
Well, I don’t bother with Sartre, so I wouldn’t know that.
Well, science, philosophy - perhaps I meant science:
That sounds like replacing one problem with an even bigger one!
krossie’s law of evolving systems dyamics - if you let worms out of can you made need a bigger one to re contain them.
Does this have anything to do with gurl fiends…
errr
kp
The “problem with Nietsche”… but then he had so many, didn’t he?
I love the trade. I love to build stuff. But I will not work under these circumstances. Unregulated free enterprise means that anybody, despite their integrity, can start their own business. Half of the construction industry, as you know, if composed of lower-class scum. People who have the manners and intelligence of an ostrich. Why then would I work to produce a profit for these kinds of people? These people should be dead, not running their own business. The construction industry is like a quarantined prison that is avoided by the bourgeois at all costs. Bush let the Mexicans in because they provide cheap labor. He doesn’t give a fuck about the native workers because they are expendible.
When I do find a decent person to work for, inevitably there is a confrontation between us regarding methods of productivity, crew politics, and rights.
Last week I was fired because I called myself a communist. Three months before that I was fired because I called myself an atheist.
I will eventually settle down with my woman and sub-contract work. Until then, I stay out of the cess-pool as much as I can.
You’ve got the wrong communist man. The communist you speak of is the lazy coward who wants communism to happen so he doesn’t have to work. There are communists like that, you know. Myself, however, can and will work circles around most people.
To prove a point to an employer who was paying me lower wages than employees which were in his family (this is favoristism and monarchism), I produced twice as much as the two family members combined…then I quit. The day was planned that way. I had an argument with him concerning my rate of pay the day before and how it wasn’t rational, so to prove this to him…I made it a reality, then when he complimented me and became all excited about having me as an employee (how much money I could make him)…I told him to fuck off and I quit. He learned a lesson…a lesson that he forgot the very next day, no doubt.
But really man, the industry is a complete disaster. There are too many chiefs and not enough indians. Too many irrelevent middle men who do nothing but make higher profits than those who do work. I don’t play that game. I don’t deal with parasites.
Impossible. I know every problem that can occur between people in a relationship and can spot them coming a mile away. I learned from the master, Sartre. Nobody has exposed the real existential problems in human relationships better than Sartre. Most people are not aware of the real problems, so their solutions are useless. They stand confounded between problems that are not problems with solutions that are not solutions to the problems they are not aware of.
One cannot know the hell of human relationships until they understand Sartre. Likewise they cannot possibly solve them until they do. You have to go through Sartrean hell before you make it to Sartrean heaven. Most people and most of their problems are suspended in nonsense limbo.
I’ve dated more girls/women then I can count, and each case failed. I took notes. I’m a professional relationship counselor, except I refuse to get paid for my services.
Now, have a seat on this couch and tell me why you have an aversion to relationships.
That’s what I usually think whenever I read N.
Except I mean it.
Let us get back to Nietzsche now.
In The Will to Power, in section 940, we find a terminology which must needs remind us of the three metamorphoses of the spirit in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
We are reminded of Nietzsche’s remark I quoted above, in which he likens the Supermen to the Epicurean gods.
Nietzsche begins the section numbered 940 as follows:
The last man is mediocre, whereas the Superman is a “golden nature”. The warrior, who acts as a living “wall of swords” between the two, is a man of overflowing strength.
Nietzsche uses the phrase “golden nature” elsewhere, in a book he actually published. There it says:
“Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism—there the sincerest advocate of the “beyond,” the great slanderer of life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature.”
[On the Genealogy of Morals, third treatise, section 25.]
Homer is of course presented in The Birth of Tragedy as the paragon of Apollinianism. I take this to have the following significance in this context:
“It must be noted that the Apollonian/Dionysian dualism was a feature of his [Nietzsche’s] early period (e.g., ‘The Birth of Tragedy’).
By his magnum opus ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ he had subsumed Apollo in Dionysos, and only now talks of Dionysos which is a synthesis of the two.
He saw that all dualities were rather different poles of the same thing (see ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, first chapter).”
[Moody Lawless, On Being Nietzschean, III.]
Already in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sharply discerns the Greek Dionysus from the barbarian Dionysus. This is reflected in the final statement of section 940, which we have hereby quoted in full:
“The barbarian gods express nothing of the pleasure of restraint - are neither simple nor frivolous nor moderate.”
The Superman is moderate, whereas the last man is mediocre - a stark difference.