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The best thing I've ever read...

September 5th 2010 14:15

The best thing I've ever read... on Nietzsche (yes, excuse the misleading title but hey, you gotta market, right?), is in the chapter 'Paris. Nietzsche the Great Martyr' from Nikos Kazantsakis's autobiographical book Report to Greco. What can I say, but, wow. This guy gets it. He doesn't waffle around on the superficial words and logic of Nietzsche as many academics and commentators do, but rather takes the philosophy as is and deals with its implications in the world, judging it accordingly (which, I might add, is what all philosophical process should entail). And the implications are damning, at least for Kazantzakis and his hero, Friedrich. Nietzsche stood toe to toe with the "abyss", resulting ultimately in his madness, and Kazantzakis prepares himself for the same fate, spending three years in one of the most beautiful and cultured cities in the world, Paris, but hardly leaving his room, choosing to explore the eternal questions of meaning rather than exploring the more transient, but far more candescent, streets of Paris.

I'm not going to go into the conclusions and deductions that Kazantzakis reaches, because I'm not sure that that is the point of the writing. And besides, reading the chapter is a process in itself, and for me to attempt a quick summary of it here would be to strip it of its flesh and leave only its bones.

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Sour Grapes

January 8th 2010 15:05

The saying "sour grapes" started with an Aesop's Fable. We all know what it means - but, how wide are its implications? Is there a connection between sour grapes and Nietzsche's ressentiment?

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If you have to ask, you'll never know

November 11th 2009 06:33

I have to write a blog today or my account will apparently become inactive, so, I'll just write a short one on a favourite quote of mine that I'll continue in a later blog.

"If you have to ask, you'll never know".

I love this because it is in favour of intuition. Particularly in my field of study, philosophy, people are asked to explain why they believe what they do. The problem is, though, that the reasons given are always only an approximation if what they already believe through their intuitive, or pre-rational, thought.

It also applies to aesthetics and more subjective fields. In the field of wine tasting, for example, if you are given a glass of Penfolds Grange, only to ask what is so good about it, it indicates a non-discerning sense of smell and taste, which no amount of explaining can account for.

It also applies to my blogs: if you have to ask what the he'll I'm on about, no amount of explaining on my part will fully enable you to grasp my point of view.

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By their fruits you shall know them

September 12th 2009 07:30

In the bible, Matthew 7:16 to be precise, it states that "by their fruits you shall know them". What this means, by analogy of how well a fruit can bear fruit, is that you can know somebody by their outward manifestations. I will analyse and expand upon the implications of this in more detail:

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in Beyond Good and Evil
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It Takes One to Know One, Part I

August 29th 2009 07:01

I have been doing a lot of thinking recently, and a lot of observing (yeah I know, what's new). Something that has become clear to me is the truth of the saying, "it takes one to know one". Yes I know this comment is often used in jest, for example:

Kid 1: You're an idiot

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You can never step in the same river twice

February 26th 2009 13:44

"You can never step in the same river twice"

I've been thinking a lot recently about careers - what path to follow, what job to go after etc. This got me thinking about identity - if I am to know what job or career is best suited to me, then I first have to know who I am. Of course, this is a massively problematic question. Who indeed am I?? It's a question at the centre of a lot of philosophical and spiritual inquiry

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Why I write this blog

February 19th 2009 12:16

I was thinking about this blog, and it occurred to me that it's a bit purposeless. I initially started it because I found quotes to be interesting, and contain a lot of truth (or at least the potential for truth). Reading back over my blogs though, the various quotes used have just been excuses for me to splurge my opinion on things, and while I enjoy having that outlet, it doesn't seem to be very purposeful. In addition, it is very unlikely that people who type "quotes" or "quips" into Google are looking for a hyper-analysis of what a quote means or its implications. As such, I'm going to change this blog at some point into a format where the readers that find the site will be people who are actually looking for strongly opinionated analysis on generally held wisdom.

My blog is NOT intended to be light reading and I don't want anymore to attract readers who are just looking for some smart quips or their origins.

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"Mr Businessman, you can't dress like me"

February 11th 2009 04:36

Ok, so this isn't an often quoted quote, but I really like it. If you don't recognise it, Jimi Hendrix sings it in his song "If 6 Was 9". And this is the reason I like it:

I think a lot of people are being pulled in two directions: one is in the direction of how they want to think and act, the other is in the direction of how they are told to think and act. For example, I have always had a fairly casual demeanor - I don't like to take things too seriously unless they really require it. Now in the area of work and school, this has caused me no end of problems, because they want to pull me in the direction of being "professional", or in other words, non-casual. So I have these conflicting forces: one is inside of me, telling me to act not necessarily casually, but appropriate to the situation (which often is casual, because I don't believe everything requires my full attention). The other force is from outside of me, which tells me to be "professional" or to "work hard". One force is the self, the other is the world

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If you're bored then you're boring, pt.3

December 2nd 2008 06:03

The last two blogs I wrote on this topic were a bit self-helpish along the lines of "how do you know if you're boring or just bored?" I'm quite sure now that if anyone thinks they are boring, they are just projecting their own boredom onto other people. So in the question of which comes first: boredom or boringness, the answer is boredom.

I've come to realise recently how much of a part boredom has played in my life. For example, the main preoccupation in my life is guitarring, and I distinctly remember wanting to learn guitar in year 8 so that I would have something to do on boring afternoons after school. I went to uni because I was bored of work, quit uni because I got bored of that, then recently went back after I was bored of work again. I started going to the gym because I was bored of sitting at home at night, after I got bored of going out almost every night. Most new movies and music bore me - they are so formulaic and predictable, so much like everything that has come before them. A lot of people bore me

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"Time flies when you're having fun"

November 26th 2008 08:03

I think it's interesting how true this saying is. Time really does fly when you're having fun - in fact, it's one of the defining aspects of fun. If time isn't going fast for you while you're doing something, then it's hard to imagine that you're having fun doing it. It's the inverse of the saying "a watched pot never boils" - where by paying close attention to the waiting process, time slows down almost to a standstill.

This saying is surely not to be taken literally, as if it is a physical entity with a varying speed. What does it mean, then, for time to go fast? I'm very curious about this question because I have a feeling it will tell us something interesting or important about human psychology. We think of time as something neutral and external which passes without our intervention. We measure it by our clocks and by the sun rising and setting, but time is not the measurement. If the sun came started to rise and set faster than normal, we wouldn't say that time is moving faster, and the same with our clocks. Really, time is measured most importantly in relation to our bodies and our experiences(after all, as Nietzsche said, "there is no absolute measure of anything"). The growing, ageing and decaying of the body is the first and biggest indicator of time as a straight line, our first notion of a beginning and an end. Secondly, our experiences are equally important - if someone's body grew and aged quicker than normal, we wouldn't say time has sped up (although we might say that it has sped up for them). The reason for this is that they haven't had x amount of time to use their body. They haven't had the length of experiences that would normally be associated with the normal span of a life. If I am right, then, we could be stuck with a circular definition of time. Experiences, such as watching a pot boil, are measured by their length of time, but time is measured by length of experience (maybe that is what this new book, The Time Paradox is about - I don't know, I haven't read it

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