Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part II (on Schein)

Apparently no one should survive Wagner's Tristan and Isolde if it were presented in it's purely Dionysiac format. Everyone on stage would die of intense pleasure and pain at the same time when the audience disappeared in a puff of unnecessity.

Well now I have to see this opera, obviously.

And the word 'Schein' translates on Google to "sham"... so interpret this:

"Socrates correctly diagnoses tragedy as a purveyor of Schein, but fails utterly to see the point of this Schein. Part of the reason for this, Nietzsche thinks, is that Socrates is a deeply abnormal, unhealthy man, (and Nietzsche is so different? I mean that lovingly and with a little intellectual crush.) a man of stunted and perverted instincts and a diseased intellect that has run wild. His abnormality take the form of a kind of hyperintellectualized simple-mindedness. When he looks at tragedy, he fails to see it as an instance of life, and thinks it is just a simple lie/illusion." (Ah yes, I assume he's probably an ENTP, but that doesn't make him unhealthy or diseased of intellect. I would also guess Nietzsche was an INTJ or an INFJ, though probably the former since he seems kind of detached from actual people [not the ideas of people he knows] in his life. Also just because I'm an INFJ, doesn't mean everyone whose opinions I like to listen to will be one too.)

However, from the current Cambridge translation by Raymond Geuss, schein means "semblance." I'm still not certain what is meant by this semblance which gets used an awful lot throughout Birth of a Tragedy, but it has something to do with reflecting the well-balanced Appoline dream-image in measure with some good old-fashioned Dionysiac chaos.

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part I

Nietzsche's 'Will' appears to be similar to Freud's "libido." The underlying tension of the world revolves around sexual desire on a base level. I would jump in and attach some degree of violence to that scenario, but since violent primal urges are not something I have ever experienced, I suppose those who do could classify those urges as sexual too. Because women don't seem to display the same sort of violent urges man can, and because I know from B.W. Pelham's psychological studies of implicit and explicit self esteem that men are less self-reflective and thus less in touch with their own concept of themselves, it is indeed possible that I agree with Nietzsche in that The Will, keenly expressed in sexual desire, drives all humans towards satiation or frustration.

When Nietzsche describes Socrates as the ruination of artistic society, pitting his suggestion that men are capable of controlling their own destinies entirely through the acquisition of scientific and/or moral knowledge, against the previous Apolline/Dionysiac dualism he seems to look far too romantically at what he terms the "tragic culture" of Archaic Greece. According to Raymond Geuss's Introduction to Birth of a Tragedy, "Apolline" connotes a different reference to the Greek Apollo than does the word "Apollonian" which I construe to be about physical magnificentness and celebrity as opposed to the author's suggestion of individuality and self-discipline. Also Dionysiac seems to describe the organic way in which improv happens leaving the home base of structure in music, rather than "Dionysian" decadence and general anarchy for the sake of pleasing the flesh at any cost. I do agree that any institution or being does have both of those concepts within and one is usually more dominant - this explains the Myers-Briggs P (Dionysiac) or J (Apolline) preference.

But the author describes Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, his narrative operas as having that Dionysiac quality and I have never known a musician who didn't discipline him/herself even to the point of bleeding on an instrument during practice. How do you create organic art with others having no socialization in music, no hard-earned skill, no long-practiced repertoire?  Fishy.

Though Birth of a Tragedy was critically panned at publication, I'm fond of the basic problem the critic, Wilamowitz had with it. From Geuss's Intro:

"Apart from various points of detail, Wilamowitz correctly diagnosed and categorically rejected Nietzsche's attempt to do 'philology' in a way that would make it more like philosophy or art than like a strict 'wissenschaft'; the proper mode of access to the ancient world, Wiliamowitz asserted, was through the painstaking study of history 'in der askese selbstverlaufender arbeit' (of asceticism in self-leveling work), not through the mystic insights used in Birth of a Tragedy. It is perfectly true that,given a choice, Nietzsche would prefer Weisheit to Wissenschaft, so there was no real response he could make to that basic charge."

And just for reference from Wikipedia:

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.^[1]

Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin. Classical philology is historically primary, originating in European Renaissance Humanism, but was soon joined by philologies of other languages both European (Germanic, Celtic, Slavistics, etc.) and non-European (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). Indo-European studies involves the philology of all Indo-European languages as comparative studies.

Any classical language can be studied philologically, and indeed describing a language as "classical" is to imply the existence of a philological tradition associated with it.

Two Haikus

I am your body
Forget me not, though I am
Animal and bones

I am your spirit
Forget me not, though I am
Sky without practice

Adventure Scouting

I went on an adventure today to scout some locations off the beaten path that I have seen by chance and photograph them for near future use. I already have ideas for at least one of these locations.

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