That enormous framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which the needy man saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats, and when it smashes It to pieces, throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, paring the strangest,…
The wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable, let us say the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-working wonder which mythos presupposes, more akin to a dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under…
…waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when the woof of his ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right,…
It is language which has worked originally in the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher…
Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphors, only by congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only by…
…the Romans and Etrusceans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas divided up mathematically, and it understands the demand…
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had…
A grey, damp day! Yea! I hope to go for a walk this afternoon, an eyes-wide-open walkabout. Daytime temps are around the freezing point for the first time in many days. A mammalian body does not do well in a single digit environment. So, I plan to stroll a while, and enjoy what I…
…[the] awful energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically thinking and highly emotional –fantastic age is quite remarkable. “Grant me but a certainty, ye gods!” is the prayer of Parmenides, “and be it, in an ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough to lie on! Everything becoming, everything luxuriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving,…
I continue to read Nietzsche’s description of the philosophers who came before Socrates/Plato. Plato is the watershed of the intellectual heritage of the West. Plato, a composer of theatrical drama introduces us to Socrates by his collection of Socratic Dialogues. Socrates is an example, teacher/role model. He instructs by provoking reflection, the exercise of…
