<p>Gong Xi Fa Chai, everybody. I wish I was back in Malaysia so I could celebrate Chinese/Lunar New Year properly. :D</p>
<p>i almost forgot what winter looks like in china… since the last time i was there for winter was 11 years ago. why is it always summer… when its like 45 degrees in china? they measured the temperature at the bus station, which of course is like 5 degrees hotter due to exhaust fumes, and it was like almost 50 degrees at 2 in the afternoon</p>
<p>eating left overs right now.sigh. chinese new year. have fun everyone. got my psat back. not very pleased with the result.lol.jk. i never cared about sat or psat. i ll get the 2000th post btw.</p>
<p>lol. bow and irg…you guys need some sleep…</p>
<p>actually i think i need some sleep
but i need to get my sleeping schedule back to normal. so yes…</p>
<p>8am classes suck</p>
<p>wow…1925!</p>
<p>(stupid 60 seconds rule)</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>arg. how much longer…? 20 seconds?</p>
<p>hmm let’s see. do you guys have this habit of eating obsessively? like once you start eating something you like, you just CAN’T stop?</p>
<p>my mom has this tendency to shop at sam’s club (…bad idea…considering how gigantic the packages are!)</p>
<p>so yesterday i was eating those truffles in my room…then 10 mins later i stopped myself and counted the wrappers…18 of them</p>
<p>then i turned the package around and read the nutrition facts…and found out that i’ve just consumed 300% saturated fat, 1440 calories, etc… </p>
<p>then i went on a treadmill for like an hour…</p>
<p>yea it’s pretty bad</p>
<p>alright. a new day (…well, though half of it’s gone already)…i think i’ll try to make something of it. so k. i’m off to work…</p>
<p>enjoy your saturdays guys!</p>
<p>lol, **一出，谁与争峰。。。。。。
你（们）就像那一把火，熊熊火光，温暖了我；你就像那一把火，熊熊火光，照亮了我。。。。。。。好像是费翔。。。。。。还有好多。。。你从哪里来，我的朋友，好像蝴蝶飞进我的窗口。。。俺又陶醉了
i’m watching cctv’s spring festival on line, pretty jamed, i can only hear it.
想灌水，让我用我宝刀未老的掌力送你们一程。。。。。。嘿咻。。。。。。嘿咻</p>
<p>三百六十五里路呀，从少年到白头；有多少三百六十五里路，越过多少春夏秋冬；三百六十五里路呀，岂能让它虚度。。。。。。</p>
<p>老夫昨日大战琵琶精，功力有点透支；待老夫暂去吃几颗金丹</p>
<p>带着微笑看世界，为了幸福和希望。。。。。。
慕然回首中。。。。。。感怀飘零的花朵，尘世中无从寄托。。。。。。</p>
<p>然后就是忘情水，俺不用多说了</p>
<p>想不到康师傅十年后还在打红烧牛肉面的广告，更不可思议的人家都穿的西装革履的买康师傅方便面
还有那个李宇春牌flat panel 只卖RMB4,880元。</p>
<p>在这喜庆洋洋的时候，袁某到哪里去了</p>
<p>无语…感谢诸位大力支持…祝大家新年步步高升!</p>
<p>Bow Challenge Re-launched: Since there are 20 posts on each page, the last post on page 100 would be the 2000th post.</p>
<p>Whoever gets that will get a special gift from Bow… I will buy the person Swarthmore Renato’s Pizza and a fabulous meal at Cheng Hing Restaurant!</p>
<p>You know you want these…come on :)</p>
<p>out, out, brief candle, life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.</p>
<p>The logic of dreams. When we sleep, our nervous system is continually stimulated by various inner causes: almost all the organs secrete and are active; the blood circulates turbulently; the sleeper’s position presses certain limbs; his blankets influence sensation in various ways; the stomach digests and disturbs other organs with its movements; the intestines turn; the placement of the head occasions unusual positions of the muscles; the feet, without shoes, their soles not pressing on the floor, cause a feeling of unusualness, as does the different way the whole body is clothed after its daily change and variation, all of this strangeness stimulates the entire system, including even the brain function. And so there are a hundred occasions for the mind to be amazed, and to seek reasons for this stimulation. It is the dream which seeks and imagines the causes for those stimulated feelings–that is, the alleged causes. The man who ties two straps around his feet, for example, may dream that two snakes are winding about his feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief, accompanied by a pictorial idea and elaboration: “These snakes must be the causa12 of that feeling which I, the sleeper, am having”‑thus judges the mind of the sleeper. The stimulated imagination turns the recent past, disclosed in this way, into the present. Everyone knows from experience how fast the dreamer can incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it after the fact from his dream, so that he believes he is experiencing first the occasioning factors, and then that sound’13
But how is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober, careful, and skeptical about hypotheses? Why does he think the first best hypothesis that explains a feeling is enough to believe in it at once? (For when dreaming, we believe in the dream as if it were reality; that is, we take our hypothesis for fully proven.)
I think that man still draws conclusions in his dreams as mankind once did in a waking state, through many thousands of years: the first causa which occurred to the mind to explain something that needed explaining sufficed and was taken for truth. (According to the tales of travelers, savages proceed this way even today.) This old aspect of humanity lives on in us in our dreams, for it is the basis upon which higher reason developed, and is still developing, in every human: the dream restores us to distant states of human culture and gives us a means by which to understand them better. Dream-thought14 is so easy for us now because, during mankind’s immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea. In this way dreaming is recuperation for a brain which must satisfy by day the stricter demands made on thought by higher culture.
A related occurrence when we are awake can be viewed as a virtual gate and antechamber to the dream. If we close our eyes, the brain produces a multitude of impressions of light and colors, probably as a kind of postlude and echo to all those effects of light which penetrate it by day. Now, however, our reason (in league with imagination) immediately works these plays of color, formless in themselves, into definite figures, forms, landscapes, moving groups. Once again, the actual process is a kind of conclusion from the effect to the cause; as the mind inquires about the origin of these light impressions and colors, it assumes those figures and shapes to be the cause. They seem to be the occasion of those colors and lights, because the mind is used to finding an occasioning cause for every color and every light impression it receives by day, with eyes open. Here, then, the imagination keeps pushing images upon the mind, using in their production the visual impressions of the day–and this is precisely what dream imagination does. That is, the supposed cause is deduced from the effect and imagined after the effect. All this with an extraordinary speed, so that, as with a conjurer, judgment becomes confused, and a sequence can appear to be a synchronism, or even a reversed sequence.
We can infer from these processes, how late a more acute logical thinking, a rigorous application of cause and effect, developed; even now, our functions of reason and intelligence reach back instinctively to those primitive forms of deductions, and we live more or less half our lives in this state. The poet, too, the artist, attributes his moods and states to causes that are in no way the true ones; to this extent he reminds us of an older mankind, and can help us to understand it.
12. cause
13. Cf Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition) V, pp. 23-30.
14. Das Traumdenken.</p>
<p>My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.</p>
<p>Ennoblement through degeneration. History teaches us that that part of a people maintains itself best whose members generally share a vital public spirit, due to the similarity of their long-standing, incontrovertible principles, that is, of their common faith. In their case, good, sound custom strengthens them; they are taught to subordinate the individual, and their character is given solidity, at first innately and later through education. The danger in these strong communities, founded on similar, steadfast individual members, is an increasing, inherited stupidity, which follows all stability like a shadow. In such communities, spiritual progress depends on those individuals who are less bound, much less certain, and morally weaker; they are men who try new things, and many different things. Because of their weakness, countless such men are destroyed without having much visible effect; but in general, especially if they have descendants, they loosen things up, and, from time to time, deliver a wound to the stable element of a community. Precisely at this wounded, weakened place, the common body is inoculated, so to speak, with something new; however, the community’s overall strength, has to be great enough to take this new thing into its bloodstream and assimilate it. Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it.
Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest1 does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. Rather, two things must coincide: first of all, stable power must increase through minds bound in faith and communal feeling; and secondly, it must be possible to attain higher goals when degenerating natures partially weaken or wound the stable power; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes progress possible at all. If a people starts to crumble and grow weak at some one place, but is still strong and healthy in general, it can accept being infected with something new, and can incorporate it to its advantage. The task of education is to make the individual so firm and sure that, as a whole being, he can no longer be diverted from his path. But then the educator must wound him, or use the wounds that fate delivers; when pain and need have come about in this way, something new and noble can also be inoculated into the wounded places. His whole nature will take it in, and show the ennoblement later in its fruits.
Regarding the state, Machiavelli2 says that “the form of governments is of very slight importance, although semi-educated people think otherwise. The great goal of politics should be permanence, which outweighs anything else, being much more valuable than freedom.” Only when permanence is securely established and guaranteed is there any possibility of constant development and ennobling inoculation, which, to be sure, will usually be opposed by the dangerous companion of all permanence: authority.
- Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).
- Niccol</p>
<p>A male culture. Greek culture of the Classical era is a male culture. As for women, Pericles, in his funeral oration, says everything with the words: "They are best when men speak about them as little as possible…"13
The erotic relationship of men to youths was, on a level which we cannot grasp, the necessary, sole prerequisite of all male education (more or less in the way love affairs and marriage were for a long time the only way to bring about the higher education of women); the whole idealism of strength of the Greek character was thrown into that relationship, and the treatment of young people has probably never again been so aware, loving, so thoroughly geared to their excellence (virtus), as it was in the sixth and fifth centuries-‑-in accordance with Hölderlin’s beautiful line, “denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten” (for loving the mortal gives of his best).14 The more important this relationship was considered, the lower sank interaction with women: the perspective of procreation and lust-nothing further came into consideration; there was no spiritual intercourse with them, not even a real romance. If one considers further that woman herself was excluded from all kinds of competitions and spectacles, then the sole higher entertainment remaining to her was religious worship.
To be sure, when Electra and Antigone were portrayed in tragedies, the Greeks tolerated it in art, although they did not like it in life; just as we now do not tolerate anything with pathos in life, but like to see it in art.
Women had no task other than to produce beautiful, powerful bodies, in which the character of the father lived on as intact as possible, and thus to counteract the increasing overstimulation of nerves in such a highly developed culture. This kept Greek culture young for such a relatively long time. For in Greek mothers, the Greek genius returned again and again to nature.
13. “That woman is most praiseworthy whose name is least bandied about on men’s lips, whether for praise or dispraise,” Thucydides, 1.2.35:46. The funeral oration celebrates the Athenians who had fallen in the Peloponnesean War (431 B.C.)
14. Der Tod des Empedokles, first version, act 2, sc. 4.</p>
<p>Tyrants of the spirit. The life of the Greeks shines bright only when the ray of myth falls on it; otherwise it is gloomy. Now, the Greek philosophers rob themselves of precisely this mythology; is it not as if they wanted to move out of the sunlight into the shadow, the gloom? But no plant wants to avoid light: actually, those philosophers were only seeking a brighter sun; mythology was not pure or shining enough for them. They found the light they sought in their knowledge, in what each of them called his “truth” But knowledge shone ever brighter at that time; it was still young, and still knew too little of all the difficulties and dangers of its ways; it could still hope to reach the midpoint of all being with a single bound, and from there solve the riddle of the world. These philosophers had a firm belief in themselves and in their “truth,” and with it they overcame all their neighbors and predecessors; each of them was a combative and violent tyrant. Perhaps the happiness of believing oneself in possession of the truth was never greater in the world, but neither was the harshness, arrogance, tyranny, and evil of such a belief. They were tyrants, which is what every Greek wanted to be, and which each one was, if he was able. Perhaps only Solon15 is an exception: in, his poetry he tells how he despised personal tyranny. But he did it out of love for his work, for his lawgiving; and to be a lawgiver is a sublimated form of tyranny. Parmenides, too, gave laws, probably Pythagoras and Empedocles as well; Anaximander founded a city. Plato was the incarnate wish to become the greatest philosophical lawgiver and founding father of a state; he seems to have suffered terribly that his nature was not fulfilled, and towards the end, his soul became full of the blackest bile. The more Greek philosophy lost power, the more it suffered inwardly because of this bile and need to slander. When various sects finally fought for their truths in the streets, the souls of all these suitors of truth were completely clogged with jealousy and venom; 16 the tyrannic element raged like a poison in their bodies. These many petty tyrants would have liked to devour one another raw; there was not a spark of love left in them, and all too little joy in their own knowledge.
The tenet that tyrants are usually murdered and that their descendants live briefly is also generally true of the tyrants of the spirit. Their history is short, violent; their influence breaks off suddenly. One can say of almost all great Hellenes that they seem to have come too late, thus Aeschylus, Pindar, Demosthenes, Thucydides; one generation follows them-and then it is always over forever. That is the turbulent and uncanny thing about Greek history. These days, of course, we admire the gospel of the tortoise. To think historically these days almost means to imply that history was always made according to the principle, “As little as possible in the longest time possible!” Alas, Greek history goes so quickly! Never has life been lived so prodigally, so immoderately. I cannot convince myself that the history of the Greeks took that natural course for which it is so famous. They were much too diversely gifted to be gradual in a step-by-step manner, like the tortoise racing with Achilles,17 and that is what is called natural development. With the Greeks, things go forward swiftly, but also as swiftly downwards; the movement of the whole mechanism is so intensified that a single stone, thrown into its wheels, makes it burst. Such a stone was Socrates, for example; in one night, the development of philosophical science, until then so wonderfully regular but, of course, all too swift, was destroyed. 18 It is no idle question to wonder whether Plato, if he had stayed free of the Socratic spell, might not have found an even higher type of the philosophical man, now lost to us forever. We look into the ages before him as into a sculptor’s workshop, full of such types. The sixth and fifth centuries, however, seem to promise even more and greater things than they produced; but it remained at promises and declarations. And yet there is hardly a heavier loss than the loss of a type, the loss of a new, previously undiscovered, supreme possibility of philosophical life. Even of the older types, most have been handed down to us inadequately; it seems to me extraordinarily difficult to see any philosopher from Thales to Democritus19 clearly; but the man who is successful in recreating these figures strolls among creatures of the mightiest and purest type. Of course, this ability is rare; even the later Greeks who studied the older philosophers did not have it. Aristotle, particularly, seems not to have his eyes in his head when he is faced with them. And so it seems as if these marvelous philosophers had lived in vain, or even as if they had only been meant to prepare the way for the combative and garrulous hordes of the Socratic schools. As we said, there is a gap here, a break in development; some great misfortune must have occurred, and the sole statue in which we might have recognized the sense and purpose of that great creative preparatory exercise must have broken or been unsuccessful. What actually happened has remained forever a secret of the workshop.
What took place with the Greeks (that each great thinker, believing he possessed absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that Greek intellectual history has had the violent, rash, and dangerous character evident in its political history) was not exhausted with them. Many similar things have come to pass right up to the most recent times, although gradually less often, and hardly any longer with the Greek philosophers’ pure, naive conscience. For the opposite doctrine and skepticism have, on the whole, too powerful and loud a voice. The period of the spiritual tyrants is over. In the domain of higher culture there will of course always have to be an authority, but from now on this authority lies in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Despite all spatial and political separation, they form a coherent society, whose members recognize and acknowledge each other, whatever favorable or unfavorable estimations may circulate due to public opinion and the judgments of the newspaper and magazine writers. The spiritual superiority which formerly caused division and enmity now tends to bind: how could individuals assert themselves and swim through life along their own way, against all currents, if they did not see their like living here and there under the same circumstances and grasp their hands in the struggle as much against the ochlocratic nature of superficial minds and superficial culture as against the occasional attempts to set up a tyranny with the help of mass manipulation? Oligarchs need each other; they are their own best friends; they understand their insignias-but nevertheless each of them is free; he fights and conquers on his ground, and would rather perish than submit.
15. Solon, Greek lawgiver (640-560 B.C.).
16. Eifer-und Geifersucht
17. In The Achilles, Zeno (c. 490 B.C.) recounts the paradox of Achilles’ race with a tortoise, cited in Aristotle’s Physics 2396 15-18 and in Plato’s Parmenides 128C.
18. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, secs. 13-15, especially.
19. For more about Nietzsche and the pre-Socratic philosophers, see Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Marianne Cowan, trans. (Chicago: Gateway, 1962). For more about Nietzsche and Socrates, see Werner J. Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s View of Socrates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1974).</p>
<p>Error about life necessary for life. Every belief in the value and worth of life is based on impure thinking and is only possible because the individual’s sympathy for life in general, and for the suffering of mankind, is very weakly developed. Even uncommon men who think beyond themselves at all do not focus on life in general, but rather on limited parts of it. If one knows how to keep his attention primarily on exceptions, that is, on the great talents and pure souls, if one takes their coming into existence to be the goal of all world evolution and rejoices in their activity, then one may believe in the value of life–for one is overlooking other men, which is to say, thinking impurely. And likewise, if one does focus on all men, but takes only one type of drive, the less egoistical type, as valid and excuses mankind in respect to its other drives, then too one can hope something about mankind as a whole, and believe to this extent in the value of life–in this case, too, through impurity of thought. But whichever is the case, such a stance makes one an exception among men. Most men tolerate life without grumbling too much and believe thus in the value of existence, but precisely because everyone wills himself alone and stands his ground alone, and does not step out of himself as do those exceptional men, everything extrapersonal escapes his notice entirely, or seems at the most a faint shadow. Thus the value of life for ordinary, everyday man is based only on his taking himself to be more important than the world. The great lack of fantasy from which he suffers keeps him from being able to empathize with other beings, and he therefore participates in their vicissitudes and suffering as little as possible. On the other hand, whoever would be truly able to participate in it would have to despair about the value of life; if he were able to grasp and feel mankind’s overall consciousness in himself, he would collapse with a curse against existence–for mankind, as whole, has no goals and consequently, considering the whole affair, man cannot find his comfort and support in it, but rather his despair. If, in everything he does, he considers the ultimate aimlessness of men, his own activity acquires the character of squandering in his eyes. But to feel squandered as mankind (and not just as an individual), as we see the single blossom squandered by nature, is a feeling above all feelings.
But who is capable of it? Certainly only a poet–and poets always know how to comfort themselves.</p>