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The nausea induced by the open sea, with no shores in sight. Nietzsche often uses that metaphor for the situation when people realise "God is dead".
Or maybe not nausea, but giddiness. "Jelly-legged and restless", in the sense of not having a firm basis to rest on. "Turtles all the way down", like Morla in the Neverending Story...
It used to be "hee for God only, shee for God in him": that is, man used to be woman's "rock", because he used to have a Rock of his own. But now all rocks have come to appear relative. "We are the ones who know the mountain passes"... Even the Himalayas, even Shiva's mount Kailash is moving.
I have discovered relative land on the horizon, relatively solid ground beneath our feet, by the way.
Philosophically, I mean. "[W]ithin the absolute flux of phenomena, there is relative eternity ('eternity' derives from the Greek aion, a lifetime or century--cf. saeculum). Man, for example, has been relatively consistent since prehistory. [...] 'Noble, relative nature replaces divine, absolute nature.' [...] Nature as conceived by modern science (cf. aphorism 22 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil) is noble, is to be seen as noble. [...]
What morality, then, can be based on all this? To be as noble as nature, we have to be indifferent as to the direction of obedience; the old custom, religion, laws, state is nobler than the young, as long as it endures. Now of course there may be other considerations; and philosophy remains paradoxical. Aren't genuine philosophers always people who somehow get estranged from 'the fold'? And who remain changed by their estrangement, even if they ostensibly return to it? Yet there's an old and (therefore) venerable tradition of Western philosophy--not to mention the Eastern." http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?t=193537&p=2684623
::
After some more rambling elsewhere, I finally did my daily Holosync (in the beginning of which I took a single drag from my vaporiser), and it made things seem to fall into place for me. I was reminded of the passage in Strauss's "Progress or Return?" where he says:
"One can say, and it is not misleading to say so, that the Bible and Greek philosophy agree in regard to what we may call, and we do call in fact, morality. They agree, if I may say so, regarding the importance of morality, regarding the content of morality, and regarding its ultimate insufficiency. They differ as regards that 'x' which supplements or completes morality, or, which is only another way of putting it, they disagree as regards the basis of morality."
The Biblical basis is God, whereas the Greek philosophical basis is nature. Now it suddenly struck me that Nietzsche may have provided a different basis for the same morality. For example, a little further on, Strauss says:
"Greek philosophy and the Bible agree as to this, that the proper framework of morality is the patriarchal family, which is, or tends to be, monogamous, and which forms the cell of a society in which the free adult males, and especially the old ones, predominate."
Now though Nietzsche criticises monogamy (we may want to compare Maistre, however, who points out its irrationality and then contends that's precisely why it's superior to free love), he was paradoxically very old-fashioned as regards man and woman, not to mention other respects.
I then wrote, among other things, of "History as the middle ground between God and Nature, as relative God (freedom) and relative Nature (necessity)[.]" I'm a man whose Rock is a moving Turtle...
::
I guess I should ask myself: what does that whole History thing mean for me concretely/practically? Can it explain or illumine my current situation?
::
I did some soul-searching, and now think much hinges on what I regard as "companionable" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid).
::
My orientation on gezelligheid is really bringing things together for me. (Not everything, yet, but a lot. Thus my father once suggested that I look for the common ground between all my interests, and the first thing I found, later, was shamanism (wrathful deities, Batman, etc.). But that didn't bring everything together, either.)
One example is music. I've been doing experiments with tonal music for a while now. Recently, I'd deleted everything tonal from my MP3-player again (except Nietzsche, of course), but I now have a new opening, a new criterion: no longer emotion, but now gezelligheid (though often enough the two overlap, as where I'm going next should make clear).
I just added Tool's Lateralus album to my player (and listened to it while working out), though as of yet it's the only music I've added on that criterion, bar one other song. In the past, I think it happened several times that there was a thunderstorm outside while I was listening (and dancing) to it. And my favourite song from their next album actually has thunderstorm sounds featured in it ("10,000 days"--actually two tracks). I still had that song on my player recently, but that's too much on the emotion side. (It was the song that accompanied and represented, for me, my "Forumotion insight" into Nietzsche: the Nietzschean philosopher wills the recurrence out of his passion to have there be fellow philosophers in the future. Which reminds me, that I'd translate the related word "gezelschap" as "fellowship" in certain contexts. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are in many ways excellent examples of gezelligheid.)
Anyway, where I was going is here. The Doors are also marked by gezelligheid for me, though perhaps my personally favourite example is this instrumental cover by them:
The Doors - Summertime - Live 1967
I remember listening to it fondly when I was still living in my parents' basement, in my late teens.
Where I was going is here. My first bosom friend was T. Soon after we became friends, I was invited to come with him and his parents and sister to their family's farm in a rural area of the Netherlands. We had our own little building some way off from the main building, where his parents, sister, and occasional guests of theirs would live. And often enough we'd even have a little tent in a field beside our building. That field was also where I saw my first lunar eclipse. Anyway, I seem to remember that we'd lie in that tent, reading boys' books and listening to The Doors, and "Riders on the Storm" would be playing while there was heavy rain outside. That may be some kind of compound memory, and thereby technically imaginary, but it's certainly based in reality. Needless to say, I'm sure, that's basically the epitome of gezelligheid for me.
Now I'd like to sketch the kind of relationship T and I had. The first time I was at his house, when I was six, he "accidentally" spilled water over both our arms after he'd told me it was hydrochloric acid. I cried, but he declared solemnly that the best we could do was resign ourselves to having to live with scarred patches all over our arms for the rest of our lives...
On the one hand, he was very "boyish"--much more of an outside kid than I was, which was in no small part due to the part of town each of us lived in (I could hardly play outside in our neighbourhood, as it was in the city center, whereas he lived in the spacious south side, where our school was, too). At the farm, he even had a treehouse. On the other hand, he was also more nerdy than I was, with his chemistry kits and model airplanes (he knew quite a bit about the Second World War) and the like. So you could say--and I was reminded of this after watching the latest Family Guy episode yesterday--that he was Holmes whereas I was Watson. Sherlock Holmes, too, is an example of gezelligheid for me, though Holmes himself does admit, when he writes his own accounts in the doctor's absence, that one cannot just write clinical, technical accounts of his cases if one is to hold the reader's attention, and that Watson had a knack for giving his accounts that human dimension. And I realised only days ago that my father may have tried to bring home to me my own attractiveness when he'd quote, as he often did when T was mentioned long after he and I had lost touch: "OllieOllieOllieOllie!" (T sometimes stuttered back then, and that was what he would exclaim when he was trying to get my attention, which was often.) My part was essentially to be "the faithful companion".
(Or "loyal" or whatever.) Our friendship lasted till I was ten, but when I was eleven, and T stayed home sick one week, I made the acquaintance of B, who'd been in our class since we were six (T and I were both new at that school at the time, whereas most others had been there since kindergarten). B was the social outcast of our class, but then we became friends, and T was pretty jealous when he returned. His reaction may well have been why I chose B over him when I had the choice (jealousy is not gezellig; and it was clear my side was too small for the two of them). B was even considerably more of a nerd than T was, and also even considerably more of an inside kid than I was. (I also had this other friend, C, from age 6 to 9, but I wasn't his bosom friend but just one of his many friends (T wasn't); we'd often spend vacations at his mom's family's land, which had a cottage with a small lake, and a trailer, and quite a lot of forest land. All of us, which would be five or six boys, would play outside all day, often with C's dog, except B; he would be inside most of the day, building stuff with the Meccano C had there. Once I was sick there, and I spent an evening looking at the hearthfire, and then that night my eyes felt like they had melted. Hearthfires and campfires are also prime examples of gezelligheid.)
But my history of gezelligheid didn't start with T. My mom's always been most preoccupied with it, and my dad married her, of course. Our house would always have lots of wood, and as colours go brown and beige and dark red and green and orange (or siena), but little white and never blue. Thus the pictures featured on the Dutch Wikipedia page on the related Danish concept hygge are not really gezellig in my view: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygge The outside picture, not quite, because of the blue door (but still pretty much, because of the rest), and the inside picture, not much at all, because of the terrible--in my view--interior decorating. It's very much a matter of taste, but then, Zarathustra says:
"And ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!" ("The Sublime Ones", Common trans.)
Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most gezellig book, because from the beginning there's already a company of two: Zarathustra and the narrator. But Zarathustra is also the perfect indication that one doesn't technically need company in order to experience gezelligheid. Thus Zarathustra also says, indeed exclaims:
"O lonesomeness! My home, lonesomeness! Too long have I lived wildly in wild remoteness, to return to thee without tears!" ("The Return Home".)
And when I didn't have my brother G or my bosom friend T or B, I would often play on my own. I remember being at my mother's mother's and her expressing her marvel at how well I could entertain myself. At that moment I was playing with Goldbug, a later rendition of the first-hour Transformer Bumblebee (and already a less gezellig-looking one). B had Bumblebee, which was cool. But so before I had T, let alone B, I had G. Even in my youth, my mom told me she should probably have waited at least another year with her second child, and back then I would agree: I had her complete attention for too short a period (less than two years), and after that the newborn needed most of that attention, of course. But however much truth there may be to that, I now think there's even more to the contrary: it was great that I had G to play with at home, inside first with He-man and then the Transformers and then G.I. Joe, and outside on the day trips my father often took us on, which was often enough to our forest cottage but also to other forests, to the beach and dunes, etc. G.I. Joe, by the way, was overlapped by video games: first the NES, then the Sega Megadrive, and then the Super NES. Co-op games would be the best, but otherwise we'd take turns or, even better, take on each other like in Street Fighter (even in co-op games we would hit each other if we could, or try to kill each other by dragging the screen forward or back with our character and the like--though we'd still cooperate more than obstruct).
I kind of had that for a while with S during the time she's been here: not only could I be the somewhat bully-ish big brother I'd been to G (just teasing though, in her case, never really mean), but we had great times playing co-op games, Far Cry 3 and 4 and especially Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2. I'd really like to play Far Cry 5 co-op like that one day (and also perhaps Portal 2, which was too brainy for her and G). Also, I had that with my friend L, too, but then with games like New Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country Returns. Like this one time I--Mario--picked up L--Luigi--and jumped into a pit with him. Both dying at the same time meant we had to start from our last checkpoint, but it was worth the look on his face!
In the last couple of years, though, L has been less and less willing to play co-op (I suppose we'd already played the best co-op games in the retro genre, and moreover I'm better than he with a controller). I'd just been playing games on my own with him sitting next to me (not as in rally, though). Still, he was really offended when I could no longer combine our weekly gaming sessions with my work schedule. To me, it wasn't a big deal, but to him it apparently was--perhaps because I can experience gezelligheid on my own whereas he cannot? He's a single child, and he's always had a girlfriend since he's been my friend, often getting a new one in a matter of days after his relationship ended. I don't consider L very gezellig. He and B have known each other since infancy, by the way. B, too, isn't all that gezellig: more so than L, but less than T. Still, I think they, and indeed most people, may find me ongezellig, but that's because I prefer being on my own to being among people I consider ongezellig--tasteless and boring. I think a situation can't be boring and gezellig at the same time. And of course I'm more easily bored, less easily amused, than most people. B really was the beginning of my development as an intellectual: it was for his company that I wanted to go to the gymnasium, and thanks to his pulling me up with him intellectually that I could apply for it.
Although, T went to the gymnasium as well...
Or maybe not nausea, but giddiness. "Jelly-legged and restless", in the sense of not having a firm basis to rest on. "Turtles all the way down", like Morla in the Neverending Story...
It used to be "hee for God only, shee for God in him": that is, man used to be woman's "rock", because he used to have a Rock of his own. But now all rocks have come to appear relative. "We are the ones who know the mountain passes"... Even the Himalayas, even Shiva's mount Kailash is moving.
I have discovered relative land on the horizon, relatively solid ground beneath our feet, by the way.
Philosophically, I mean. "[W]ithin the absolute flux of phenomena, there is relative eternity ('eternity' derives from the Greek aion, a lifetime or century--cf. saeculum). Man, for example, has been relatively consistent since prehistory. [...] 'Noble, relative nature replaces divine, absolute nature.' [...] Nature as conceived by modern science (cf. aphorism 22 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil) is noble, is to be seen as noble. [...]
What morality, then, can be based on all this? To be as noble as nature, we have to be indifferent as to the direction of obedience; the old custom, religion, laws, state is nobler than the young, as long as it endures. Now of course there may be other considerations; and philosophy remains paradoxical. Aren't genuine philosophers always people who somehow get estranged from 'the fold'? And who remain changed by their estrangement, even if they ostensibly return to it? Yet there's an old and (therefore) venerable tradition of Western philosophy--not to mention the Eastern." http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?t=193537&p=2684623
::
After some more rambling elsewhere, I finally did my daily Holosync (in the beginning of which I took a single drag from my vaporiser), and it made things seem to fall into place for me. I was reminded of the passage in Strauss's "Progress or Return?" where he says:
"One can say, and it is not misleading to say so, that the Bible and Greek philosophy agree in regard to what we may call, and we do call in fact, morality. They agree, if I may say so, regarding the importance of morality, regarding the content of morality, and regarding its ultimate insufficiency. They differ as regards that 'x' which supplements or completes morality, or, which is only another way of putting it, they disagree as regards the basis of morality."
The Biblical basis is God, whereas the Greek philosophical basis is nature. Now it suddenly struck me that Nietzsche may have provided a different basis for the same morality. For example, a little further on, Strauss says:
"Greek philosophy and the Bible agree as to this, that the proper framework of morality is the patriarchal family, which is, or tends to be, monogamous, and which forms the cell of a society in which the free adult males, and especially the old ones, predominate."
Now though Nietzsche criticises monogamy (we may want to compare Maistre, however, who points out its irrationality and then contends that's precisely why it's superior to free love), he was paradoxically very old-fashioned as regards man and woman, not to mention other respects.
I then wrote, among other things, of "History as the middle ground between God and Nature, as relative God (freedom) and relative Nature (necessity)[.]" I'm a man whose Rock is a moving Turtle...
::
I guess I should ask myself: what does that whole History thing mean for me concretely/practically? Can it explain or illumine my current situation?
::
I did some soul-searching, and now think much hinges on what I regard as "companionable" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezelligheid).
::
My orientation on gezelligheid is really bringing things together for me. (Not everything, yet, but a lot. Thus my father once suggested that I look for the common ground between all my interests, and the first thing I found, later, was shamanism (wrathful deities, Batman, etc.). But that didn't bring everything together, either.)
One example is music. I've been doing experiments with tonal music for a while now. Recently, I'd deleted everything tonal from my MP3-player again (except Nietzsche, of course), but I now have a new opening, a new criterion: no longer emotion, but now gezelligheid (though often enough the two overlap, as where I'm going next should make clear).
I just added Tool's Lateralus album to my player (and listened to it while working out), though as of yet it's the only music I've added on that criterion, bar one other song. In the past, I think it happened several times that there was a thunderstorm outside while I was listening (and dancing) to it. And my favourite song from their next album actually has thunderstorm sounds featured in it ("10,000 days"--actually two tracks). I still had that song on my player recently, but that's too much on the emotion side. (It was the song that accompanied and represented, for me, my "Forumotion insight" into Nietzsche: the Nietzschean philosopher wills the recurrence out of his passion to have there be fellow philosophers in the future. Which reminds me, that I'd translate the related word "gezelschap" as "fellowship" in certain contexts. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are in many ways excellent examples of gezelligheid.)
Anyway, where I was going is here. The Doors are also marked by gezelligheid for me, though perhaps my personally favourite example is this instrumental cover by them:
The Doors - Summertime - Live 1967
I remember listening to it fondly when I was still living in my parents' basement, in my late teens.
Where I was going is here. My first bosom friend was T. Soon after we became friends, I was invited to come with him and his parents and sister to their family's farm in a rural area of the Netherlands. We had our own little building some way off from the main building, where his parents, sister, and occasional guests of theirs would live. And often enough we'd even have a little tent in a field beside our building. That field was also where I saw my first lunar eclipse. Anyway, I seem to remember that we'd lie in that tent, reading boys' books and listening to The Doors, and "Riders on the Storm" would be playing while there was heavy rain outside. That may be some kind of compound memory, and thereby technically imaginary, but it's certainly based in reality. Needless to say, I'm sure, that's basically the epitome of gezelligheid for me.
Now I'd like to sketch the kind of relationship T and I had. The first time I was at his house, when I was six, he "accidentally" spilled water over both our arms after he'd told me it was hydrochloric acid. I cried, but he declared solemnly that the best we could do was resign ourselves to having to live with scarred patches all over our arms for the rest of our lives...
On the one hand, he was very "boyish"--much more of an outside kid than I was, which was in no small part due to the part of town each of us lived in (I could hardly play outside in our neighbourhood, as it was in the city center, whereas he lived in the spacious south side, where our school was, too). At the farm, he even had a treehouse. On the other hand, he was also more nerdy than I was, with his chemistry kits and model airplanes (he knew quite a bit about the Second World War) and the like. So you could say--and I was reminded of this after watching the latest Family Guy episode yesterday--that he was Holmes whereas I was Watson. Sherlock Holmes, too, is an example of gezelligheid for me, though Holmes himself does admit, when he writes his own accounts in the doctor's absence, that one cannot just write clinical, technical accounts of his cases if one is to hold the reader's attention, and that Watson had a knack for giving his accounts that human dimension. And I realised only days ago that my father may have tried to bring home to me my own attractiveness when he'd quote, as he often did when T was mentioned long after he and I had lost touch: "OllieOllieOllieOllie!" (T sometimes stuttered back then, and that was what he would exclaim when he was trying to get my attention, which was often.) My part was essentially to be "the faithful companion".
(Or "loyal" or whatever.) Our friendship lasted till I was ten, but when I was eleven, and T stayed home sick one week, I made the acquaintance of B, who'd been in our class since we were six (T and I were both new at that school at the time, whereas most others had been there since kindergarten). B was the social outcast of our class, but then we became friends, and T was pretty jealous when he returned. His reaction may well have been why I chose B over him when I had the choice (jealousy is not gezellig; and it was clear my side was too small for the two of them). B was even considerably more of a nerd than T was, and also even considerably more of an inside kid than I was. (I also had this other friend, C, from age 6 to 9, but I wasn't his bosom friend but just one of his many friends (T wasn't); we'd often spend vacations at his mom's family's land, which had a cottage with a small lake, and a trailer, and quite a lot of forest land. All of us, which would be five or six boys, would play outside all day, often with C's dog, except B; he would be inside most of the day, building stuff with the Meccano C had there. Once I was sick there, and I spent an evening looking at the hearthfire, and then that night my eyes felt like they had melted. Hearthfires and campfires are also prime examples of gezelligheid.)
But my history of gezelligheid didn't start with T. My mom's always been most preoccupied with it, and my dad married her, of course. Our house would always have lots of wood, and as colours go brown and beige and dark red and green and orange (or siena), but little white and never blue. Thus the pictures featured on the Dutch Wikipedia page on the related Danish concept hygge are not really gezellig in my view: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygge The outside picture, not quite, because of the blue door (but still pretty much, because of the rest), and the inside picture, not much at all, because of the terrible--in my view--interior decorating. It's very much a matter of taste, but then, Zarathustra says:
"And ye tell me, friends, that there is to be no dispute about taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute about taste and tasting!
Taste: that is weight at the same time, and scales and weigher; and alas for every living thing that would live without dispute about weight and scales and weigher!" ("The Sublime Ones", Common trans.)
Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most gezellig book, because from the beginning there's already a company of two: Zarathustra and the narrator. But Zarathustra is also the perfect indication that one doesn't technically need company in order to experience gezelligheid. Thus Zarathustra also says, indeed exclaims:
"O lonesomeness! My home, lonesomeness! Too long have I lived wildly in wild remoteness, to return to thee without tears!" ("The Return Home".)
And when I didn't have my brother G or my bosom friend T or B, I would often play on my own. I remember being at my mother's mother's and her expressing her marvel at how well I could entertain myself. At that moment I was playing with Goldbug, a later rendition of the first-hour Transformer Bumblebee (and already a less gezellig-looking one). B had Bumblebee, which was cool. But so before I had T, let alone B, I had G. Even in my youth, my mom told me she should probably have waited at least another year with her second child, and back then I would agree: I had her complete attention for too short a period (less than two years), and after that the newborn needed most of that attention, of course. But however much truth there may be to that, I now think there's even more to the contrary: it was great that I had G to play with at home, inside first with He-man and then the Transformers and then G.I. Joe, and outside on the day trips my father often took us on, which was often enough to our forest cottage but also to other forests, to the beach and dunes, etc. G.I. Joe, by the way, was overlapped by video games: first the NES, then the Sega Megadrive, and then the Super NES. Co-op games would be the best, but otherwise we'd take turns or, even better, take on each other like in Street Fighter (even in co-op games we would hit each other if we could, or try to kill each other by dragging the screen forward or back with our character and the like--though we'd still cooperate more than obstruct).
I kind of had that for a while with S during the time she's been here: not only could I be the somewhat bully-ish big brother I'd been to G (just teasing though, in her case, never really mean), but we had great times playing co-op games, Far Cry 3 and 4 and especially Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2. I'd really like to play Far Cry 5 co-op like that one day (and also perhaps Portal 2, which was too brainy for her and G). Also, I had that with my friend L, too, but then with games like New Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country Returns. Like this one time I--Mario--picked up L--Luigi--and jumped into a pit with him. Both dying at the same time meant we had to start from our last checkpoint, but it was worth the look on his face!
In the last couple of years, though, L has been less and less willing to play co-op (I suppose we'd already played the best co-op games in the retro genre, and moreover I'm better than he with a controller). I'd just been playing games on my own with him sitting next to me (not as in rally, though). Still, he was really offended when I could no longer combine our weekly gaming sessions with my work schedule. To me, it wasn't a big deal, but to him it apparently was--perhaps because I can experience gezelligheid on my own whereas he cannot? He's a single child, and he's always had a girlfriend since he's been my friend, often getting a new one in a matter of days after his relationship ended. I don't consider L very gezellig. He and B have known each other since infancy, by the way. B, too, isn't all that gezellig: more so than L, but less than T. Still, I think they, and indeed most people, may find me ongezellig, but that's because I prefer being on my own to being among people I consider ongezellig--tasteless and boring. I think a situation can't be boring and gezellig at the same time. And of course I'm more easily bored, less easily amused, than most people. B really was the beginning of my development as an intellectual: it was for his company that I wanted to go to the gymnasium, and thanks to his pulling me up with him intellectually that I could apply for it.
Although, T went to the gymnasium as well...
