Marsha said to dmb: You should have an answer to my question right there in your notes. As a wannabe scholar you can expect to be challenged by those much more knowledgeable and brighter than me. Your statements should be supportable, not in the realm wishful thinking. Look up the word paraphrase; it doesn't mean blarney.
dmb says: You should have noticed that the answer to your question was always already in the text. The answer is in the paragraph you're supposedly asking about, in the line where it says, "In one of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy, he asks us to consider the consequences...". There is no reference to any of Nietzsche's other works. "...one of Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy,.." That fact that you'd twice ask a question that never needed to be asked in the place, I think, only serves to show what a careless reader you are. They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. Obviously, that's not true. Also, it seems that you are misreading Nietzsche in very much the same way that you misread Pirsig. In both cases, you take their criticism of Platonic Truth and turn it against them. You treat the solution as if it were the problem, to condemn the cure rather than the disease. Where Nietzsche seeks to overcome nihilism, you celebrate it as an achievement. At this point, I'd be very surprised if you didn't make a confused mess of it. "What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." "In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." A "movable host of metaphors" sounds an awful lot like "many marvelous analogies". To say they "seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding" is another way to say "we call these analogues reality". To say "we mesmerize our children in the name of truth" is another way to say these metaphors "have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished". Despite the fact that they are both attacking the same problem and presenting the same sort of solution, it seems that you believe that one can be used to undermine or oppose the other. Nietzsche's style is darker and more aggressive but in terms of substance and actual content, he's very close to the pragmatists. Rorty used to joke about that. From the European perspective, he'd say, pragmatism is just what the Americans could get out of Nietzsche. And beside all that, I don't believe that any question from you is going to be sincerely asked. Your questions are never posed to elicit an answer. They're just the opening move in some silly game. Your response to every one of my answers has always been some declaration about how much you don't care about my answer. If I ever saw an honest and sincere effort from you, I'd probably have a heart attack from the shock of it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > On Oct 8, 2012, at 9:15 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Is Philosophy better than Art? > > > > If you believe Plato, then the answer is “yes”. If all of philosophy is a > > footnote to Plato, then the artists have been subordinated to the > > philosophers for about 25 centuries. According to Plato’s Republic, > > especially the last section, the artists present a danger to society and to > > your soul. Two of my favorite thinkers disagree with Plato and Socrates on > > this point. Friedrich Nietzsche and Robert Pirsig both make a case that > > there is something terribly wrong with this Platonic legacy. In one of > > Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy, he asks us to consider > > the consequences of the Socratic idea that virtue is knowledge, that all > > sins arise from ignorance, and only the virtuous are happy. As a > > consequence, Nietzsche says, the “virtuous hero must henceforth be a > > dialectician” because virtue and knowledge are necessarily connected such > > that “Truth” is the highest good. Marsha rep lied: I'm really curious, and I'm sure you made notes as you were putting this paper together In the last sentence above where did you get the "because virtue and knowledge are necessarily connected such that “Truth” is the highest good." I take it that it was paraphrasing Nietzsche, but from where? It is quite an interesting statement for Nietzsche to make, and I'd like to read the statement in it's original context. Thanks. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
