On Definition: Nietzsche and Others
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade to the void. -Emil Cioran
In the middle of the 2nd essay in Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche takes on the question of human punishment. He goes to great lengths to distinguish between the origins and the purpose – or interpretations – of those various actions and happenings which are called “punishment.” Read the rest of this entry »
In continuing my expositions regarding Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant I now turn to Schopenhauer’s reading of, and terse polemic against, Kant’s ambivalent concept of the “ding an sich”, or “thing[s]” in itself.
(Originally posted in a thread on the Galilean Forums here: http://www.galilean-library.org/academy/viewtopic.php?p=20475#20475
It would be good to read the opening post to orient oneself before reading my reply.)
The terse proclamation that “all thought is anthropomorphic” stands as a singular, and thereby comparatively less vivid, echo of the voice of the viruses that spawned with philosophy. These self-dissolving elements within the great project actualize in their affective potential from between the minute text filling the magnum opuses of the great philosophers – from the white spaces between words and thoughts. Philosophy’s demise lies in the admission of its inability to capture the ultimate contingently.
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Abstract: A short essay in progress on Bataille’s conceptions of “intentionality, violence, exploration, chaos, novelty, death, and opening” in The Story of the Eye. I propose that Bataille’s explanations of sex tacitly and subtly point to an integral phenomena that I will call “opening”. Some of my explications, elaborations, and interpretations.
Abstract: An explication of Schopenhauer’s diagnosis vis a vis Kant’s “great mistake”: his conflation of abstract and empirical elements of the mind –or operations of the brain, as Schopenhauer would see it– in reference to the greater concept of perception. I will be looking at a section of Schopenhauer’s Appendix of the World as Will and Representation that purports to pick through and upgrade some major ideas of Kantian epistemology as they relate to perception; these ideas include: representation, object-of-representation, understanding, sensibility, the forms of intuition and the infamous Kantian categories.
A Summary and Evaluation of R. Lanier Anderson’s Defense of Fritzean Perspectivism.
Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer: Stoicism in Resolution and Independence
In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth meets the question of “what” a poet is by placing her/him directly and inextricably within the context of the world. A poet sees “man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other … He considers man and nature essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature” (Wordsworth, Preface 271). Read the rest of this entry »
