I like nature
I've been reading Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche. I've found his method much more interesting than any of his main points(although they certainly are interesting!). He complains that philosophers "are not sufficiently candid," pretending to have "discovered [their] opinions through the self-development of cold, pure, divinely untroubled dialect" (Article 1, Section 5). I'm not doing page citations b/c I'm sure several editions exist—esp. since this is online—and so page numbers are effectively meaningless. This seems more influential socio-culturally than any assertions against religion. Any institution can withstand outright attacks. Nietzsche here redefines the very construction of a worldview. By changing the rules of construction he changed the possible worldviews. It is by the same principle that few Grand Slams occur in soccer; a Grand Slam simply does not make sense within the rules.
But how did he redefine it? He certainly offered descriptive analysis: "Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided by his instincts and forced along certain lines. Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand value judgments, or, to speak more plainly, physiological demands for preserving a certain type of life"(Article 1, Section 3). Looking beyond the actual point of these sentences (that philosophies usually exist primarily as a sort of socio-cultural-cultic self-defense mechanism), Nietzsche doesn't actually replace the Enlightenment and Scientific ideal of objectivity with anything.
gah, i'm tired. I should do this later.
It gives you a wierd sort of ego-vertigo (vertego?) to google your name.
I got about 5,720 hits (with quotes so only the string "John Pate" returned true).
Anything Goes is going fairly well.
alright goodnight
-=-raptur-=-
