Ted Winslow wrote:
> joanna bujes wrote:
> "A man's maturity consists in finding once more the seriousness he had
> as a child at play."
I think this is very true -- as opposed to the shallow seriousness Wilde complains of. Heraclitus said something similar: "Time is a child at play." Have you ever looked at the self-less concentration/absorption of a child at play -- the way they deliver themselves whole to the experience? --the way they learn/act/experience simultaneously and without attachment?
Most people think that growing up consists in the rejection of "childish" things; I think rather that it lies in the consciousness of those things, in the realization of their universal value....the value of love, the value of trust, the value of openness, and the value of play (not as a diversion but as a form of soul-making work -- Marx's sense).
> Dissolving the aspects of mind that enable reason to replace instinct
> as the source of desire won't produce activity aimed at mere innocuous
> amusement, will it? The insight in Nietszche is that when this is
> done what will get acted out is an unrestricted sadistic will to power.
>
> “To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest gratification of the
> feeling of power.”
I'm not a Nietzche expert. I know, however that the left's and the Xtian rejection of "aggression" is inadequate. Aggression does not inevitably translate into cruelty, nor is children's play merely instinctive. Aggression is an innate part of animal life -- and we are animals. The question is only what we do with it.
> An associated insight is that the kind of "reason" at work in the
> version of "materialism" dominant in modern "science" is a hiding
> place for this sadism. He thinks (self-contradictorily, according to
> Heidegger) that this "science" will, ironically, destroy all barriers
> to acting out by destroying any rational ground for limiting instinct
> (i.e. the kind of "reason" involved has "positivism" as one of its
> logical implications - radical skepticism is another of these
> implications) and by demonstrating that what we are "naturally" is the
> "cruelest animal."
Well, yeah. Stanley Milgram's experiments kind of proved the above. Also note the illusion that "scientific" means of killing: guillotine, lethal injection, electric chair, precision bombs and more moral than "bestial" means of killing -- like beheadings.
> Marx is at the opposite end. His "materialism" is radically different
> from the one Nietszche mistakenly identifies with "rationality" per
> se. Like Aristotle, he understands childish play - "mere amusement" -
> not as an end in itself but as instrumental to the "serious"
> activities productive of the highest forms of pleasure and happiness.
> This is the ground of his dissent from Fourier's conception of ideal
> activity as "mere fun, mere amusement."
Marx versus Nietzche is too big a subject...and not necessarily a fruitful one, I think.
Joanna