Reviews and Comments

Better than The Birth of Tragedy, and literally destroys someone like Russell. Of course, it is highly personal, but plainly, Nietzsche's insights are true. Not only that. I guess when people start reading philosophy, they, or at least some of them, are already in the mindset that intuitively comprehend and know what Nietzsche is saying here. But it gradually becomes impossible, when reflective thought, and more over, self-consciousness drives him away from the primordial mystic intuition that led him to philosophy and religion and art, and possibly mathematics and physics. Hence this little unfinished book is another tragedy. And as I can see it, Nietzsche chose a dead-end path. Magnificent, but dead-end. Oh, Nietzsche, my dear, of course Plato was not a mixed type! The theorized account of his intuition is approximately a hybrid (and not really), but you youself knew that he was closer to you than any of the pre-Socratics.

It may seem bizarre to compare the novel with Greek tragedies, but there's still a vestige of analogy, though in its core Buddhist. There's no melancholy, but still a strong feeling of loss. Life goes on, and on, and on, as river flows, in its course stirring eddies and waves, finally into the sea to perish. Some fade away in the course, prematurely; eddies stir and vanish without leaving a trace. Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, now green in youth, now withering on the ground; so generations in their course decay; so flourish these, when those are pass'd away. Sunset is lingering, taints every corner of the Kansai region, dyed in an elegiac golden redness, but over this red sunset, still, a sky of watery blue and the fresh scent of spring, the shivering of cherry blossoms. Every ritual and every miniscule details are that of death but yet also that of life, so frail, so precious, so destined to death and decay, but eternal for what it leaves: the memories of time.

This almost Mozartian intensity is hard to detect, but once it's felt, it lives on. What is to come is the great war and grave hardship, and the total annihilation of this old way of living, this aristocratic elegance, and the patience, the frail but beautiful rituals of life that is permeated by a premonition of death. But still, how splendid, and how graceful is the sunset, in its stubborn April fragrance, and the perseverance of frail human life.

While these are cranks and fringe theorists, they're not stupid. Rupert Sheldrake is very much a crank who is devoted to developing a superficial theosophy-like (not that it is theosophy but it has some family resemblance to theosophy) cosmology that has no explanatory power over anything whatsoever but how his mind works is still an interesting thing to ponder upon. Terence McKenna got some strange ideas but is overall philosophical and (strangely) deep. Ralph Abraham is modest and not-that-Crankish. Reading conversations like this awakens people from the "dogmatic slumber" that they're embedded into, and from the rather filmsy reasoning it is still possible to observe a kind of possibility that they might be right in some regard. And, moreover, the conversation shows that these cranks are actually brilliant minds. One thing I don't like about New-Age stuff is, though, since they're American, their aesthetic choice is so poor that one cannot really take them seriously without some actual effort.

It can be seen plainly from the interviews that Stockhausen was a more-or-less mindless follower of the trends of the mid 20th century, a New-Age practitioner, a semi-reader of Jung, culturally semi-educated (just like a lot of musicians), etc.

There's virtually no serious thinking but pretensions to understanding this mysticism or that spiritual thing. His perception of music history and its concordance with the universal history is crude and cliched, with a tint of New-Age-ish pretension of multiculturalism.

If you're from a Darmstadt school or whatever and say stupid things you'll be deemed as a prophet, but if you're a Jazz musician who says the exactly same things but only not coated with pretensions of understanding then you're a quasi avant-garde who knows not what he himself is doing. You know a Hoelderlin, then you must be cultured and have a higher mind. You don't, then fuck you. That's how midwits percept the world.

So I guess if I say these in that little grind site occupied by snobs and stupid morons they'll be targeting me, but fortunately there's no piece of filth like that here so I don't need to be bothered by turds.

I really don't know why M. complicates the matter to this extent. Hume's problem is really a problem regarding the objective but possibly unknown regularity of nature. Popper's misunderstanding lies at that, while he accepts that the present explanation of a regularity might be breached, he never thought it possible that the objective regularity of nature as an ontological property can be subject to change over time. Epistemological a regularity is always assumed, and science needs to find this regularity; human science might fail, but regularity itself is never believed to be able to fail suddenly. Now, as for Kant, Hume's problem is epistemological solved by means of elevating this regularity of objective and external nature to a regularity that stems from the very possibility of constructing the phenomenal world: without this regularity the phenomenal world cannot be constructed.

Hence M.'s thesis is simply that, what if one of the fundamental assumption of general relativity, namely the general covariance of spacetime, is false, and that moreover or better still, what if in principle there's no way to account for the essential irregularity of world. And he thinks it is possible to challenge Kant's thesis that consciousness itself, which structures the phenomenal world, guarantees and posits the existence of objective regularity of the world, since, plainly, extro-science fictions factually exist and are completely comprehensible to its readers. These are broadly regular, approximately regular, worlds, that do not need to even obey a statistic or a probabilistic law, where scientific method can only penetrate to some extend, but never fully chart. Moreover, a non-regular world is not a chaotic one, but sometimes or in some aspect regular, but some other times and in some other respect irregular one. Thus, these are fundamentally non-regular that are still capable of being constructed.

This is ALL!

Herder, along with Fontenelle, Vico, and Schelling, are these underappreciated figures that the Anglo-Saxons due to their strict empiricism, deism, along with a tradition, originating from the Reformation's abolishment of sacraments such as Eucharist, that rejects the fantastic and the irrational, may not really like. These are theoreticians that proposed to view religion as religion, myths as myths, and suggested a possibly irrational root of human culture. Nowadays people tend to think it is Freud who single-handedly conjured up the notion of unconscious, prefigured by Nietzsche, but no, this is a long tradition that goes back to Joachim of Fiore and even earlier. A large field of contemporary humanity couldn't have emerged without the works of these unappreciated philosophers. And Herder is probably the most underappreciated one. It was he who transformed Goethe from a lawyer and a poet into a full-blooded proto-architect of German romanticism. It was he, along with Oetinger, Baader, etc., who motivated Hoelderlin and Schelling in their research into the myths and into the mystical cults. It was he who virtually created the modern discipline of anthropology in its non-reductionist shape - though it was Kant who coined the term. In these writings the modern human science as a whole takes the shape. It might be argued that these writings are now largely out-dated, but that is only for the mediocre mind. There are so many insightful gems hidden here, that these works should be ceaselessly be read, reread, pondered, and reflected on.