superfluidity

Wound Man A diagram of potential wounds, and notes about the...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:48:00 -0500

Wound Man

A diagram of potential wounds, and notes about the liklihood of survival for each.

"My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward,..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:45:06 -0500

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.”

-
A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author.

(via mills)

I’ve always thought that his idea of the eternal recurrance, with which this is intimately bound, was much better advice than living every day “as if it were your last.” Instead, live each day as if you would have to repeat all days over and over eternally.

Although Ecce Homo was written in the last part of his life, this idea had been formulated in his earlier works, as early as the Gay Science, and more clearly in Zarathustra, so I don’t think we have to worry about advanced states of dementia.

Arthur

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:18:18 -0400

I just watched the movie “Arthur” last night for the first time, and for some reason I kept thinking about Duplo’s cat. I wonder if he’s anything like the character in the movie.

"Who does not know that it is more advantageous and better to enjoy peace than to be assailed by war?..."

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:07:36 -0400

“Who does not know that it is more advantageous and better to enjoy peace than to be assailed by war? Nevertheless, wars produce more good soldiers than does peace. The situation with eloquence is similar. For the more often it has stood in the line of battle, as it were, and the more blows it has delivered and received and the greater the adversaries and the more bitter the battles it has deliberately chosen, so much the more is it, in public report, loftier, more distinguished, and ennobled by the very trials it has endured.”

- Not Nietzsche, but Tacitus in his dialogue on the evolution of oratory in Rome.

"Y.’s new edition of this speech will be welcomed; it will be used by scholars and students..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:00:56 -0400

“Y.’s new edition of this speech will be welcomed; it will be used by scholars and students with much profit, although once past the introduction the Greekless reader will find that absence of translation and Greek lemmata (both features of the Cambridge series) will make the book hard going.”

- Yeah, in all likelihood someone who doesn’t know Greek would find it difficult to read 70 pages of Greek. Professional review by Ian Worthington of the Cambridge edition of Demosthenes’ On the Crown, which in this sentence, at least, only slightly out-does that of Ian Dow (see previous).

"I like this book because it has lots of pages and I can roll like 2 or 3 blunts out of it. I think..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:09:43 -0400

“I like this book because it has lots of pages and I can roll like 2 or 3 blunts out of it. I think when I smoke the pages the smoke carries the meaning to my brain and I learn and stuff.”

- Amazon review by “Ian Dow” of the Cambridge edition of Demosthenes On the Crown. I think I’m going to buy it.

"America has changed a lot in those four years: back then questioning the president made you a..."

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:32:38 -0400

“America has changed a lot in those four years: back then questioning the president made you a traitor, today it makes you a patriot.”

- Stephen Colbert on his show’s fourth anniversary.

"In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold,..."

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:21:00 -0400

"In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold,..."

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:09:45 -0400

“In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.”

-
I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?

Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?

(via mills)

As usual I think Mills is spot on in his reading of this passage. This has long been recognized by acute readers, but in my undergraduate experience it was also ignored, which is the more curious because there are other hints scattered throughout the work to suggest this. In the early part of the work, somewhere in book two I think, Socrates suggests that we use the example of the city’s justice to examine the justice of an individual man, in the same way that we might use larger letters to read smaller versions of the same thing. It is also important to keep in mind that although this is clearly Plato, he is attributing the words to Socrates. When he writes the Laws later, he deliberately uses an anonymous Athenian rather than Socrates, which I think suggests a different intention, namely that the Republic is to be understood primarily as an ethical investigation rather than one of political science.

We are told that early in his life Plato wrote tragedies, and considered himself an artist, and he must always be read, in my opinion, as an artist, otherwise we risk misreading him, in the same way that we must read Nietzsche, which is different from, say, Spinoza or Kant. That said, however, I think it is also true that for both Plato and Socrates, the distinction between philosophy and political life wasn’t as distinct as it typically is for us. When he talks famously about kings being philosophers, he says that it is not an impossibility. It is hard to say that Plato did not believe that what he was suggesting for the individual would not also be prudent for the city.

Incidentally, I think of these three translations, Bloom’s is the best, and better than Jowett’s in a few places. Plato seems to say that the man will “found a city in himself,” and it will be based on what he sees (rather than awkwardly repeating the subject of “beholding” twice). As regards “living after the manner” of the city, the verb πράσσω can have several different meanings. Jowett isn’t necessarily wrong to suggest “living”, since it can mean “pass over, experience”, but I like Bloom’s “mind the things of this city”, or better yet “to manage” or “to study”, which is the business of a philosopher. In trying to understand what he means, I think it is useful to keep in mind the example of the death of Socrates. Rather than play the political game which was expected of him, he insisted on his ideal notion of politics (in the sense of “being a citizen”) and affirmed the city’s decision even though it meant his own end. I think the lines immediately preceding these offer some support for that.

filthygorgeousthings: French photographer Lucien Clergue (b....

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:13:52 -0400

filthygorgeousthings:

French photographer Lucien Clergue (b. 1934), has a vast repository of work which has spanned over 40 years. Some of his favorite motifs were Gods and Goddesses, gypsies, portraits of his good friends Picasso and Cocteau, and of course, the female nude.This image, Sea Nude, Carmargue, 1958, is thought to be a depiction of the birth of Aphrodite, all full of sea foam and come.

Lost works of Suetonius that I wish I could read:

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:28:14 -0400

1. Lives of Famous Whores

2. Physical Defects of Mankind

3. Greek Terms of Abuse

4. Critical Signs Used in Books

"No complete human being has the self-sufficiency to be infallible in either word or deed: the best..."

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:44:50 -0400

“No complete human being has the self-sufficiency to be infallible in either word or deed: the best is the man who hits the mark most often and misses it least.”

- Dionysius of Halicarnassus

"One further question remains to be answered; it is an odious charge and is in favor in popular..."

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:43:16 -0400

“One further question remains to be answered; it is an odious charge and is in favor in popular quarters, but it can easily be shown to be unsound. The fact that I fall short of Thucydides and other authors in ability does not mean that I have forfeited the right to examine their style. Men who do not possess the same artistic powers as Apelles, Zeuxis, Protegenes and the other famous painters have not been barred from passing judgment on their work; and the same is true of the lesser craftsmen who have appraised the sculpture of Phidias, Polyclitus and Myron. I need not say that the layman is as competent a judge of many things as the expert (those things which are apprehended by the irrational senses and the feelings) and that these are the faculties which all forms of art aim to stimulate and are the reason for its creation.”

- Dionysius of Halicarnassus

"Such a man as Scaliger, living in our time, would be a better critic than Scaliger was, but we shall..."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:54:49 -0400

“Such a man as Scaliger, living in our time, would be a better critic than Scaliger was, but we shall not be better critics than Scaliger by the simple act of living in our own time.”

- A.E. Housman

"You can’t impregnate nine women and have a baby in one month."

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:46:00 -0400

“You can’t impregnate nine women and have a baby in one month.”

- I completely missed the context for this (and I can’t even imagine what it was) but I heard someone on the radio attribute this to Warren Buffett earlier this evening.

crashinglybeautiful: James Robertson - Hadrian’s Library...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:01:13 -0400

crashinglybeautiful:

James Robertson - Hadrian’s Library Athens, 1884

Did God sabotage the Large Hadron Collider?

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:52:00 -0400

Did God sabotage the Large Hadron Collider?:

“A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

lapoor: today in science my friend and i discovered the world’s...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:33:43 -0400

lapoor:

today in science my friend and i discovered the world’s first ever two headed flying rat. our teacher gave us a little tin foil ball and when we looked inside there was an owl pellet containing a bunch of bones, so we searched through what seemed like a hairball for this creature of glory. (note- at this point we hadn’t discovered the wings yet.)

"I have heard analytic philosophers get furious at comparative literature departments for trespassing..."

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:05:38 -0400

“I have heard analytic philosophers get furious at comparative literature departments for trespassing on philosophical turf by teaching Nietzsche and Derrida, and doubly furious at the suggestion that they might teach it themselves. Conversely, I have heard fans of Continental philosophy be obnoxious about the ‘mere logic-chopping’ with which their analytic colleagues waste students’ time and dehydrate their minds. Like reciprocal charges of incompetence, this sort of rhetoric is pointless. It is also dangerous, for it can actually result in colleges and universities not having people on the faculty who can explain certain books to interested students. Yet the only way in which institutions of liberal learning can justify their existence is to be places in which students can find practically any book in the library – Gadamer or Kripke, Searle or Derrida – and then find somebody to talk with about it. When all the jockeying to decide which department’s budget will bear the freight is over, we have to make sure the result has not been to limit the possibilities open to the students.”

- Richard Rorty: Consequences of Pragmatism (via tragos)

"Hey Barack Obama, congratulations on your Nobel Peace Prize and imma let you finish, but Heath..."

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:36:27 -0400

“Hey Barack Obama, congratulations on your Nobel Peace Prize and imma let you finish, but Heath Ledger’s Oscar was the most undeserved award of all time!”

- Matt