Compos Mentis

It's pronounced "Neat-She"...er, I think...

It's been a while since I last posted. I'm still suffering from the same afflictions I was complaining about at the beginning of my last post. I have a midterm test in English on Friday and I'm not looking forward to it. I have an oral exam in Japanese on Thursday, and I'm really not looking forward to it. On the plus side, I was one of the few people who got an A on our first English paper, and I also got an A- on a philosophy test I took, but that's more annoyance than pleasure. Stupid ego.
Anyway, though I wanted to put up a post to let everyone know that I'm still alive and okay, the thing known as college has taken up a lot of my time and energy, so I'm not getting the opportunities to come up with ideas. I've cut back on my reading, and I haven't gone running in five days. You non-runners have no idea how terrible that is.
I won't leave you without some things to think about, though. Though lessened, my reading still continues. Today it was some Nietzsche. Some of you may be familiar with that name. He is most famous for his statement, "God is dead, and we have killed him." I have to laugh at him, though, because while it may have seemed in the late 1800's that the evidence was against God's existence, mankind's concept of Him continues to flourish and survive. I think he would have been surprised at how things turned out. And, while he certainly disagreed with most Christian doctrine, I think that the concept of 'God' that he was challenging is one that we would disagree with and attack also.
But that is not where I wanted to go with this. If you're interested with disagreeing with him, go look up some of his works or find an edition that has selections of his work; he was not the kind of philosopher that could be summed up in one book, and writes many things that are contradictory and paradoxical.
This is what I want to discuss. I like Nietzsche as a challenge: I find he has the most potent response for many of my beliefs and opinions, not just on religion and ethics but also philosophy, history, and aesthetics. He is also willing to put forth opinions that other philosophers are scared or unwilling to admit to. I admire that, and find that his writing is refreshing. But I want to attack some of what he says anyway.
The statement that really caught my eye today is one on a subject I have considered before. Nietzsche says that philosophers study men and postulate universal truths about them from what they find. But, he says, this is flawed because men are different today then they were hundred years ago, or a decade ago, or a millennia ago, so no universal statements about mankind can be fully complete because the philosophers really only describe the present day. In some sense, I have to agree with him. A lot of what philosophers do is exactly that, as I've said before: putting a modern spin on things. However, with my model of reality that I've recently discussed, I can address his argument more fully. Certainly, at one level, the theme of philosopher's works hold the silent premise "in this day and age, such is true," but on another level, there are assertions that are true (or false) for all humans. We have a basic nature that is common to all of us, otherwise we couldn't find any connection with the past in the literature and artefacts we discover. On the other hand, we are also different, because otherwise all humanity would have one culture. In both scenarios, the idea of global community that we see throughout history would not exist. We have to live in a paradoxical reality, and while Nietzsche usually realizes that, he hiccoughed on this one.
Another thing that he says, while I'm at it, is that there is no 'truth' that we can access using language, because all statements is merely "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" ('On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral sense') combined into patterns that we try to fit into saying things with meaning. But, looking at words the way I've described, we find that Nietzsche (and all the postmodernists who follow after him) are barking up the wrong tree. Words are not fundamental to meaning. While language can certainly not describe everything, it is the higher levels of reality where fundamental truth can be found, not in naked language.
His ideas on morality are difficult, but something struck me about today's reading: he mentions the idea that 'sleeping' morality can make later morality deeper and richer. It seems odd to think that acting barbaric for a time can make you more moral later, but think about this: some of the most moral people did indeed used to be barbaric before they grew out of it. I wouldn't put it like Nietzsche does; I would say that morality means more to the people who have experienced immorality for themselves. Does this make immorality good? No, of course not; but it can end up with good effects. Nietzsche applies this to larger things too: he says that war can be a good thing because it means that culture is asleep for a time. We can see that this is applicable in the actions of the Mongols, who slaughtered thousands in a desperate attempt to become cultured. Again, I think that in this case culture means more to the people who have not experienced it.
One other thing. I've considered my "efficient society" hypothesis, and realized that its most useful application is the analysis of (historical) people in terms of the times they lived in, and the analysis of a (historical) period in terms of the people it produces: essentially, there are no famous men who are ahead of their times. Nietzsche is an example of this: in nearly any other age his work would have been rejected and he would have been forgotten, unless he wrote it and his work was used in a later age: this would, of course, mean that he was a man of that age instead. On the flip side, we can tell, from who Nietzsche is and what he says, what kind of place late 19th century Germany was. But I'll leave that to you to decide.
Okay. I've written more than I expected to, and it was mostly stuff I'd said before. I'll get better after midterms, I promise.

posted by Emmett @ 18:33