LI has been terrible lately. We know it. Exhaustion on this end. And also – there is a strange cycle in trying to write posts daily. Sometimes, what comes out of my fingers seems like gold – and then sometimes it seems like fool’s gold. I am rather fascinated by that volatility, even if LI's poor readers might find it less than engrossing. It isn’t connected to the quality of ideas – writing isn’t a command and control process, in which the concepts come first and tell the language, or one’s share of it, how to get to work. The concepts are vaguely there, a sort of drape fluttering and room hum, and one’s share of the language is sprawled on the floor, grinding up crayons and picking their noses. And then some cognitive throat clearing occurs, and the language either jumps up and starts spontaneously doing the dance of the bumble bee back from the pollen laden flowers – which is good -- or it bucks and whinnies like a dying mule – which is bad.
Our recommend for your reading pleasure this morning is this Knight Ridder article about the freedom loving Iraqi government our boys and gals are dying for. Those boys and gals are probably proud as punch that the Iraqi gov has discovered such creative uses for the electric drill as an instrument of information gathering. Gee, it is almost as if our boys and gals are dying to reincarnate the very forms and ceremonies of the last Iraq government, Saddam Hussein’s. But that can’t be – can one imagine Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supporting that kind of thing?
Your neighbors. Their blood. Your hands. The virtuous circle rides again, and it is mornin’ in Bush’s America.
Our other recommend is a much longer and lasting read. Santayana's philosophical masterpiece, the Life of Reason, has been put up in all five volumes at the Gutenberg site. We think Santayana was the most important conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and maybe the sole original American contribution to conservative thought. Plus, he is an excellent writer (too excellent, many philosophers claim -- he liked writing a little bit too much). He makes the Strausses and Kirks look like amateur pikers.
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4 comments:
Tucholsky:
“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”
This I would tend to agree with.
There is a tender, somewhat aesthete Nietzsche--as evidenced in the Birth of Tragedy--is there not? One who also enjoys Emerson and Beethoven and poetry. Yet there is the more militaristic scary Nietzshce as indicated in your quote from Antichrist. Inconsistency, the hobgoblin of little minds and so forth. How do we know FN was not mad anyways? And the sort of programme derived from FN's books does not appear to be so complex or workable or profound: Mencken summed it up--more respectfully than any real philosopher might have-- in about 5 or 6 paragraphs: anti-democratic, anti-Christian, anti-systematic. His writing's far too individualist and rebellious to be classifed as a real nazi propagandist (as say Wagner's anti-semitic rants are); really I think there are many indications that the madness may have shown up years before the official dates of his "sickness"..............
Es Toot mir Leid for puling away on your boards. Roger the inductivist and closet-case analytical is I think preferable to Roger the post-mod Nietzschean.
In some sense Nietzsche is one of the Greats--a sort of cosmic Head Coach for the Joe Varsities of College Town Inc. who are surrounded by marxists and lesbians and the badass yokels a few miles away in El Campo; a bit of a Prussian Aristotle (tho I think he needed a bit more elbow greasing from some rotlicht Xanthippe), FN's thoughts are not so applicable apres-Freud, apres Einstein, apres-Russell/Wittgenstein, apres- Skinner and Chomsky........are they?? (Aks me nicely and I will depart).
kmort, I'm not ignoring your comments, it is just that I haven't yet got to my own argument, and I don't want to show my cards yet. I have one more post about the fascist interpretation of Nietzsche, and then I will make an argument for ... well, a way of reading Nietzsche, to put the dullest feathers on it.
I won't taint your latest Nietzschean piece, but I do think--following someone like Mencken more than any academics I may recall-- there is a fairly immutable core to FN's thought, which is anti-democratic, opposed to compassion and to "slave morality"; FN seems somewhat cavalier in places more than a german nationalist or fascist, true, but I don't think it is clear--or I dont understand how you would establish it-- that Nietzsche would have opposed fascism per se.
At the risk of grunting I will say I think (and hope ) that Nietzsche would have been horrified at the final solution and camps, but I suspect he would not have objected to the Blackshirts or Brownshirts at least in their original conception: aren't there sections praising Prussian military regiments and even Bismarck?
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