Leyla Shen wrote:But I clearly was not referring to the awareness of the one living. I have no choice, however, than to use language to communicate, as we do, and to point to meaning.
"I still live and breathe" is a particular referential statement of self-awareness and self-observation. There's hardly anything more referring to self-awareness you could have said even when you'd be trying to exemplify the conceptualization of being some individual.
Actually the phrase "I live and breath" is indeed the result of answering a question and occurring in a particular context each and every time. Not my question perhaps but another, larger one hanging over your head, plain to see.
Nietzche wrote:He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it
Yes, one of the famous Nietzsche "mask" quotes. There's a long list of them. Obviously describing his own need for a mask.
Everything we SAY is metaphor -- a figure of SPEECH -- but this in itself does not preclude us from talking with and without meaning.
Yes but again, this is also about everything we sense, name and think we've "figured" out about our existence. You're skipping the foundations to the text and the age it was written in, that is, like Spinoza's degrees of knowledge. Speech and reason were seen as
higher expressions. What is doubted about
those would also include any other opinion, conception or sense contained by it. Nietzsche does not advocate a "sense" reality, perhaps some artistic rendering but that's as far as he goes for "true" and "real".
Nietzsche's exposition here, where he details above the intrinsic deception in human subjecitivity as a unified set of concepts or as intuition, clearly expresses a particular incongurence between truth and reality.
Ah, what is reality and how do we conceive of it. That's the question. To differentiate between a "truth" and a "reality" it would be like we're back again to some old division between mind and body.
Every truth reveals the deception. The reality of an abstraction is precisely that it is an abstraction.
That distinction doesn't matter to abstract beings where the world outside abstraction remains inaccessible. Apart for those who have started to believe in "things in themselves". Like this chair, this wind, this pain, this bowel movement is
reality instead of that mathematical equation.
Things-in-themselves concepts of experience? What are THESE things exactly?
Probably what you call your life right now! Cherise it and makes sure any evil thought will not take away what you think you're having.
Surely you haven't just now realised there is a difference in each of our interpretations of it.
Your interest appears to be in philosophers and their struggle but you still appear to believe in things and experiences as some "real" substrate world. Which means you are suffering of this situation because your sharp mind sees so much bullshit and illusion but you cannot put the finger on it. And you start whacking around in frustration. Charming though!
The existential dilemma at hand is exactly that deception of self-concept -- individual as a unified, causal whole further reduced to the signified self -- robs man of the very life and capacity from which he himself derives meaning.
My own writing style has many flaws but this sentence I cannot decode at all. Meaning is derived from a particular way of living and having enough capacity? Perhaps I'd say "from which he himself derives himself, his self-concept". Then it would be clear that the very thing being created now leads to its own destruction. It's not as much the problem of the "lie" itself but the impossible perpetuation of it.
What, in the "Extra Moral Sense", could you mean by this freedom of the individual that is both opposed and desired nevertheless?
Nietzsche was at an early stage when writing the notes we are discussing 140 years later, trying to describe his "vision" of such man, later called übermensch. He mentions him here as "overjoyed hero, counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty". He did hope for a fully rational and intuitive blend, the art-scientist or scientific art. The key to understanding this struggle is to include Spinoza's definition of intuition, the knowledge of
essentials, in other words
genius: the proper knowledge of the eternal and infinite. In 1881, eight years after "Extra Moral" Nietzsche wrote ecstatic about finding out about Spinoza and called him his "precursor". In a later stage he called him again a metaphysical spider, lacking some "blood" I suppose.
For Nietzsche, like in the text of his "Stillest Hour", this all revolves around eternal recurrence, which is just one way to view the timeless present (as we cannot access it through timed descriptions anyway). He described this as the most meaningful place of places, the utter affirmation of everything. As opposed to nihilism: the celebration of meaninglessness.
Leaving Nietzsche behind here for a moment: the desire for freedom is the need to destroy what was created, our particular form of self-consciousness through the constructs of space and time, desiring
more room to dwell which is necessarily also the path to its own undoing. Nihilism is essentially the attack on all fundamentalism. But without properly, proportionally aligned foundations, humans will cease to exist, the house will fall. This is the greatest irony of modern times. But I do affirm it nevertheless.
