The tragic fate of Tragedy…

A Beautiful Tragedy by Carbine

Recently I’ve thought about how tragedy has been minimized in modern culture if not totally eliminated. If tragedy is supposed to be the aesthetic experience par excellence, the most divine product, then its slow fade to black is worth investigating. It is a given that the greatest of literary geniuses of the modern era consistently fail to produce a contemporary account of tragedy, and the reasons are legion. Continue reading The tragic fate of Tragedy…

Sometimes a spade is not a spade.

The World’s Oldest Metaphor, by Marcello Gori

Aren’t metaphors merely a colorful way of saying something literal, that is otherwise, a non-boring way of saying something boring? Merely the rhetorician’s weapon that subjects his/her audience into compliance? The dictionary of literary terms denote the metaphor as a figure of speech where something is described in the terms of another, or attribute something with a quality that is associated with something else. For instance, Walt Whitman’s metaphor for grass is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” The relation between the two terms in a metaphor is implicit, unlike a simile, where it is explicit. Continue reading Sometimes a spade is not a spade.

Boredom is not boring in itself.

Tony Hancock

I first encountered philosophical boredom in Nietzsche and Sartre during my early years, and didn’t really grasp the significance or magnitude until I read American Psycho. While vacationing in Italy, I read the majority of the Fritzean corpus and came across two important aphorisms regarding boredom: (paraphrased from memory) if the highest creatures are susceptible to boredom, then the infinitely perfect being is also susceptible to infinite boredom. Therefore when god “rested” on the 7th day he was bored with his creation so he sank to the grass and became a snake…. Continue reading Boredom is not boring in itself.

On the religious and the tragic impulses

This short blog is an illustration of the contrast between two impulses: the religious and a very ancient one, the tragic. The religious impulse comes from a long and hard look into the depths of the human element – suffering – and in the process of doing so, a divine force is postulated, inferred, invented, or projected.To be religious is to see with the eyes of faith, which is the facility of seeing in the dark. Faith enables groping around in a pitch black universe. Having such eyes leads to the absence of expectation for evidence, assurance, or justification of any sort. Continue reading On the religious and the tragic impulses

On the Genealogy of Deicide

Why deicide precedes posthumanism

The significance of the death of God has many aspects, but the most important one is the painful realization that metaphysical foundations have become empty, irrelevant, and consequently, romantic. But it is human weaknesses that keeps those foundations circulating under the pretense of necessity, due to shame, cowardice masquerading as arrogance, and self-indulgent nostalgia. Continue reading On the Genealogy of Deicide

Some comments on Nietzschean Politics in light of liberal thought

“My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank, not at an individualistic morality” Will to Power, 287

Nietzsche’s political thinking remains a source of confusion as well as embarrassment for most scholars seeking to appropriate conceptual tools, largely because they tend to be incongruous with the standard liberal ways of thinking about politics, which have prevailed for the past 200 years. In political thought, Nietzsche departs from liberalism in a number of ways:

  • He does not regard the human being as inviolable, that human life is sacrosanct.
  • Neither does he believe that all persons should be treated with equal respect as moral beings.

Much like liberalism, Nietzsche’s conception of politics is instrumental, but it differs radically from the liberal in his valuation of human life. Whereas for liberalism politics is a means towards peaceful coexistence of individual agents, for Fritz it is a means for human greatness. Fritz is committed to ‘perpetual self overcoming’ and the ‘enhancement of man.’ This enhancement does not consist of improving of the conditions of life for the majority of people, but in the generation of few striking superlatively vital ‘highest exemplars’ of the human species. The production of magnificent specimens is possible only in a society politically organized along strict hierarchical lines.