/lit/ - Literature

>>9052200
>>9051217

but you know, as far as the overman/man - ape/man metaphor goes, i do think that this is a super fucking important point, as it opens the way for the contemporary trends of transhumanism--see, for instance, ray kurzweil; and, on the dark underside, the misinterpretation in the form of nazism

the whole idea that "man is a bridge" and that the overman is yet to come--taken broadly, one can see how it doesnt even take a very serious misinterpretation to find in this the origins of something like support for artifical intelligence and the advent of the sentient machine age. of course, the manner by which this new age dawns/is fulfilled is also important: nietzsche would categorically reject the vanguardism of lenin or hitler, viz. their violence, to bring about this new future. e.g. if our new robot overlords decide just to kill us all, they aren't very nietzschean. but they might not care very much for these titles, so, you know...

that's just to say: the AESTHETIC image of the overman has yet to be written. i think this complicates a lot of what nietzsche has to say, and actually begins to pit us closer to the sociological contributions of weber, shils and geertz viz. the problem of charisma. or: does the overman create his own contexts, or does the overman respond to a context willing and ready to receive him? this reminds me deeply, too, of machiavelli and the problem of occazione: does the charismatic leader's charisma depend on context? or does the true charismatic/overman totally transcend context entirely?--here, weber's notion that the charismatic comes in the form of "So it is written in the law_____......BUT, I say unto you_______......" so does this charismatic transgression against the norm/preexisting law come with a limit? if geertz and shils see in charisma something like "being close to the center of things," e.g. as an aesthetic phenomenon instrumentalized into a source of political power, then is the overman/charismatic simply "close" to a pregiven center--or does he have the capacity to build and manufacture these centers where they otherwise do not exist? see, too, the aesthetics of burke, or the manner by which all faces are turned toward the sovereign in hobbes' frontispiece to the leviathan--thus disclosing the ultimate aesthetic grounds of their rhetorical commitments....

>>3767300
Depuis lors, la Lune entendit les chacals piaulant par les déserts de thym, − et les églogues en sabots grognant dans le verger. Puis, dans la futaie violette, bourgeonnante, Eucharis me dit que c'était le printemps.
− Sourds, étang, − Écume, roule sur le pont, et par dessus les bois; − draps noirs et orgues, − éclairs et tonnerres − montez et roulez; − Eaux et tristesses, montez et relevez les Déluges.
Car depuis qu'ils se sont dissipés, − oh les pierres précieuses s'enfouissant, et les fleurs ouvertes ! − c'est un ennui ! et la Reine, la Sorcière qui allume sa braise dans le pot de terre, ne voudra jamais nous raconter ce qu'elle sait, et que nous ignorons.

--Arthur Rimbaud, "Après le Déluge"

>>3756469

that Mann quote is really interesting.

I would push against your rendering of whorf: when you say the mind "enhances, inverts or reduces it [reality]," is this to say that the only way we can go about living in the world is to somehow pervert it? is the only way we can "act upon it" somehow connected to our ability to alter it conceptually? what would we gain be merely "leaving things as they are"?