Friday 31 March 2023
Thursday 30 March 2023
Money
Herman Melville's "The Confidence Man"
If you really want to understand the heart of darkness that defines American society, it is necessary to read Herman Melville. While Melville has the reputation of being a combination yarn-spinner and serious novelist, he is above all a profound social critic who sympathized with the downtrodden in American society. In his final novel, "The Confidence Man," there are several chapters that deal with the "Metaphysic of Indian-Hating" that, as far as I know, are the first in American literature that attack the prevailing exterminationist policy.
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/confidence_man.htm
Wednesday 29 March 2023
Tuesday 28 March 2023
Monday 27 March 2023
Sunday 26 March 2023
Saturday 25 March 2023
Friday 24 March 2023
Thursday 23 March 2023
Heart And Soul
6.1 Ethics and understanding
There are a number of connections that Schopenhauer explicitly (but more often inexplicitly) drew between aesthetic experience and both his ethics of compassion and salvation. In a strange but revelatory passage at the end of section 35 of Book III, Schopenhauer puts these words into the mouth of the ‘spirit of the earth’ [der Erdgeist]:
True loss is just as impossible as true gain in this world of appearance. Only the will exists: it, the thing in itself, is the source of all those appearances. Its self-knowledge and its consequent decision to affirm or to negate is the only event in itself. (WWR I, 207)
If one interprets this passage as espousing the view that the only really free choice an individual has is to affirm or negate the will to live after one has gained self-knowledge, then one can see a great ethical significance for art and aesthetic experience in its cognitive dimension in this thought, for it is only by way of aesthetic experience that one gains intuitive knowledge of the Ideas, or, in the case of music, of the nature of the will itself. Music especially involves feeling universal emotions, emotions shorn of particular context, motive or individual. In so far as we feel connected to all others on the level of feeling, then music has a direct connection with Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, for the feeling that we are indeed not ultimately separate individuals but are rather unified in the in-itself of the world constitutes the basic intuitive knowledge at the root of the ethical attitude of compassion.
Since aesthetic experience is the only way to gain true understanding of the world and existence in all its multiplicity, this means that aesthetic experience is a necessary pre-condition for making the ethical choice as outlined in the quote above, to affirm or deny the will, the “only event in itself”. Thus the unique cognitive significance of art and aesthetic experience in general turns out to have crucial ethical importance.
Friday 17 March 2023
Thursday 16 March 2023
Wednesday 15 March 2023
Sunday 12 March 2023
Saturday 11 March 2023
Friday 10 March 2023
Sunday 5 March 2023
Saturday 4 March 2023
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If I had my life to live over, I'd try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I ...