"Supposing I Am A Clown?" -- Nietzsche
BretCahill
-- Nietzsche
Frederick
>
> "Supposing I am a clown?"
>
> -- Nietzsche
No question or supposing about it, we each are a clown,
doing our own charade.
The situation is fraudulent, we can only keep on, keeping on,
playing our parts, very like figures in a hyper-painting.
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcn...@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
*************************
Phrase of the week :
"Our loyalties are to the species and the planet.
We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is
owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos,
ancient and vast, from which we spring."
-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
:-))))Snort!)
*************************
Dare
"BretCahill" <bretc...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20031218171614...@mb-m02.aol.com...
> "Supposing I am a clown?"
>
> -- Nietzsche
yet, perhaps...
"the truth speaks from me all the same"?
SpiralMix
.. and god. Boo!
lol
"Dare" <clyd...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:brtarc$ef1l$1...@news3.infoave.net...
Tim
>
> -- Nietzsche
>
>
>
The clown is dead. Life has killed him. How shall we atone? Do we not need
lightbulbs?
Miller
Scott
"Frederick" <mmcn...@fuzzysys.com> wrote in message
news:3FE22CB5...@fuzzysys.com...
Frederick
>
> "hyper-painting"?
>
A torn analogy. (and it was in quotes)
Consider me creative.
Immortalist
> >
> > "Supposing I am a clown?"
> >
> > -- Nietzsche
>
> No question or supposing about it, we each are a clown,
> doing our own charade.
> The situation is fraudulent, we can only keep on, keeping on,
> playing our parts, very like figures in a hyper-painting.
The situation may seem absurd but it just is and is neither genuine nor
fraudulant. A slime mold is.
I don't know just how much I agree with Sartre but he explains the concept
of "the now" and "nows" in a way as to show just how "absurd" this
roboticism is. Each consciousness or now is new[?] and cannot be attributed
to anything; it just occurs.
As concerns "a psuado-sponaneity" of a jittery water surface, a spurting
geyser (or_movie_projector) we are dealing with a "semblence of" only. [of
what?]
A train care moving 100 miles and hour full of loose rocks could rattle up
some fine semblences.
---------------------------
Transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines its
existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything
before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation
ex nihilo.... There is something distressing for each of us to catch in the
act this tireless creation of which we are not the creators.
http://n4bz.org/gsr10/gsr1005.htm
The consciousness that says "I" is what constitutes my existence and not the
"I" that appears as a non-absolute phenomenon, but as a temporally
constrained object of the world in relation to consciousness. In other
words, it is not the ego that constitutes my being, it is consciousness
itself--which is to say that consciousness is ontologically prior to the
ego, it is its antecedent. Moreover, that consciousness is afraid of its own
spontaneity does not mean that it is afraid to choose nonetheless. For if
fear of oneself were such an issue, it would result in suicide, which would
be a spontaneous and free choice affirmed despite fear. What Sartre means by
this fear is that consciousness is quick to resort to the ego on a
reflective level of consciousness so as to not have to choose regarding the
situation it is in and the decisions it is faced with. However, this
recourse to the ego is only a temporary flight in bad faith, after which it
returns to the pre-reflective, non-thetic level of consciousness. This is to
say that the fear can always be overcome and it usually is as it is for the
most part ambient in our experience on account of it being the case that it
is upon the unreflective level of consciousness that fear is recognized
non-thetically as "having to be fled from", which involves a choice of
reflection to bring about the ego into the world as a transphenomenal
object. Thus, it is when a situation is chosen in which decisions are worthy
of much anxiety that we should expect the flight in bad faith to the ego
(which is an object, out there in the world, opaque yet with spontaneity
conferred upon it).
http://www.bookhills.com/The_Words_0394747097.htm
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContVess.htm
http://my.execpc.com/~ferguson/sartre.html
Consequently, one way of thinking about how "consciousness" and
"subjectivity" operate in Damasio's schema is to view them as narrative
constructs of a spontaneous story that inscribes its own subjects into
being. And, indeed, Damasio's frequently hyperbolic metaphors describing
the evolution of consciousness as a literary process seem to bear out his
tendency to reconfigure consciousness, or subjectivity, as a third-person,
quasi-autobiographical story which writes itself through the body's
mediation:
Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must
add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking
away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body
bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events
in its environment, or, for that matter, by thoughts and by internal
adjustments of the life process. Consciousness emerges when this primordial
story-the story of an object causally changing the state of the body-can be
told using the universal nonverbal vocabulary of body signals. The apparent
self emerges as the feeling of a feeling. When the story is first told,
spontaneously, without it ever having been requested, and forevermore after
that when the story is repeated, knowledge about what the organism is living
through automatically emerges as the answer to a question never asked. From
that moment on, we begin to know. (30-1)
Thus, in addition to his specific equation of consciousness with the
far-ranging sweep of an "epic novel" (17), Damasio clearly conceives of
"consciousness" (or subjectivity) as a kind of autobiographical story that
writes itself through the mediation of the human organism. In effect,
humans become mere characters or second-order, extra-diegetic byproducts in
a play of spontaneous narrativity both from and about the body.
III. Damasio's Theoretical Progenitor: Jean-Paul Sartre
As theoretically cutting-edge as this re-conceptualization might seem,
however, Damasio's imagination of consciousness as an inscription of a kind
of originary narrative condition is not without precedent in
twentieth-century thought. Indeed, almost three decades prior to Damasio's
work, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his autobiography entitled The Words, draws
almost entirely the same conclusion:
Viewed from the height of my tomb, my birth appeared to me as a necessary
evil, as a quite provisional embodiment that prepared for my
transfiguration: in order to be reborn, I had to write; in order to write,
I needed a brain, eyes, arms. When the work was done, those organs would be
automatically resorbed. Around 1955, a larva would burst open, twenty-five
folio butterflies would emerge from it, flapping all their pages, and would
go and alight on a shelf of the National Library. Those butterflies would
be none other than I: I, twenty-five volumes, eighteen thousand pages of
text, three hundred engravings, including a portrait of the author. My
bones are made of leather and cardboard, my parchment-skinned flesh smells
of glue and mushrooms, I sit in state through a hundred thirty pounds of
paper, thoroughly at ease. I am reborn, I at last become a whole man,
thinking, talking, singing, thundering, a man who asserts himself with the
peremptory inertia of matter. (194)
Far from wanting to embrace something like Damasio's overtly materialist
account of embodied consciousness, Sartre, nevertheless, (problematically)
characterizes his own version of extended consciousness3 as the effect of a
spontaneous narrativity which seeks out a literal, material embodiment (even
if only temporarily) in order to effect itself as an "I."4 Not only does he
conceive himself to be the "precipitate of language" (192), Sartre
characterizes himself as a book which is concurrently inscribed into
existence through the process of the writing he, himself, performs. His
physical corpus is needed only insofar as it mediates his writing's
existence in the world: to tell the autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre is,
ultimately, only to tell the autobiography of "the words" he has written and
the temporary material body they effect. In effect, Sartre's autobiography
is not so much the autobiography of the famous existentialist philosopher as
it is the autobiography of his writing's instantiated and embodied
subject...
...In other words, existentialism disarticulates subjectivity from
experience and, likewise, reduces consciousness to something close to
Damasio's spontaneous, subject-inscribing narrativity.
Leaving aside an explication of Sartre's full ontology (a project which is
simply beyond the scope and time constraints of this paper), I want to
examine (briefly) Sartre's notion of "all consciousness as
self-consciousness" in order to draw out its striking commonality and its
striking divergence with Damasio's account of consciousness in order to
gesture toward how deeply embodiment philosophy (as a whole) seems to be
indebted to his prior deconstruction of the notion of "experience."9
...Sartre undoes subjectivity altogether by characterizing it as the
development of a sham ego which keeps consciousness from viewing its own
spontaneous and non-necessary nature. As Sartre notes in The Transcendence
of the Ego: An Existential Theory of Consciousness,
There is no longer an 'inner life' in the sense in which Brunschvicg opposes
'inner life' and 'spiritual life,' because there is no longer anything which
is an object and which can at the same time partake of the intimacy of
consciousness. Doubts, remorse, the so-called 'mental crises of
consciousness,' etc.-in short, all the content of intimate diaries-become
sheer performance. And perhaps we could derive here some sound precepts of
moral discretion. But, in addition, we must bear in mind that from this
point of view my emotions and my states, my ego itself, cease to be my
exclusive property. To be precise: up to now a radical distinction has
been made between the objectivity of a spatiotemporal thing or of an
external truth, and the subjectivity of psychical 'states.' It seemed as if
the subject had a privileged status with respect to his own states. (93-4)
Although both Sartre and Damasio subscribe to the utter spontaneousness of
consciousness, what becomes remarkable about consciousness, for Sartre, is
that it remains fundamentally "other" to human subjectivity (or ego). That
is, on Sartre's account, subjectivity is delimited to the ego-a false
construction which is created in order to mask the spontaneous and
impersonal nature of consciousness from itself. To quote Sartre again at
length:
The reflective attitude is correctly expressed in this famous sentence by
Rimbaud (in the letter of the seer): 'I is an other.' The context proves
that he simply meant that the spontaneity of consciousness could not emanate
from the I, the spontaneity goes toward the I, rejoins the I, lets the I be
glimpsed beneath its limpid density, but is itself given above all as
individuated and impersonal spontaneity. The commonly accepted thesis,
according to which our thoughts would gush from an impersonal unconscious
and would 'personalize' themselves by becoming conscious, seems to us a
coarse and materialistic interpretation of a correct intuition. It has been
maintained by psychologists who have very well understood that consciousness
does not 'come out' of the I, but who could not accept the idea of a
spontaneity producing itself. (97-8)
In effect, Sartre eliminates the privacy of mental experience and, as such,
would seem to eliminate the category of the mental altogether.
In addition to Sartre's seeming elimination of private mental experience, he
also (and, perhaps, more importantly for the purposes of this paper) reduces
the body to serving as a "visible and tangible symbol for the [non-present]
I" (90). Because Sartre thinks that consciousness "exists the body" (21),
the body comes to mark both the absence of the subjective "I" and the
co-presence of consciousness-as-negation-of-the-body-object.13 In effect,
the body and its specific consciousness become inextricable,
representational proxies of Sartre's larger ontological schema of
consciousness (in general) such that the body's particularity comes to count
only as a representation of its individuated but, nevertheless, impersonal
spontaneity. For Sartre, the subjective "I" becomes a marker of a bad faith
effort to maintain the distinguishability of the body, the person, the
subjective, or (even) the mental in the face of consciousness's nihilating
circle of self-referentiality with respect to the bod
The Autobiography of Consciousness
and the New Cognitive Existentialism
http://www.janushead.org/5-1/reiser.cfm
Immortalist
>
> -- Nietzsche
>
The heckler, the turncoat, the "loyal opposition?"
In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra there is a scene in which a tight rope
walker is about to walk across a wire strung between two tall buildings.
There is no safety net to catch him and the crowd in the town square watch
in suspense. The tight rope walker gets to about the middle when a clown
comes up behind him and starts taunting him. He makes fun of him, calls him
a coward, ridicules him and bounces on the wire to make him fall off. The
clown tells him he's useless, he can't even walk across without a balancing
pole.
Because of this taunting the tight rope walker loses his balance and fatally
falls. With his dying breath he admits that he's a coward like the clown
said, but Zarathustra tells him no, he was the one brave enough to get up
there even though he didn't know if he would make it. This is what makes him
superior, an overman.
http://www.netalive.org/topics/8372
http://www.brownflower.com/diasnu/clown.htm
--------------------------------
How To Know You've Hired the Wrong Clown for Your Child's Party
#18. By the end of the party, he's got every damn kid doing the "pull my
finger" trick.
#17. Clown car must be started with breathalizer device.
#16. Keeps screaming, "My name's not BO-zo, it's bo-ZO!"
#15. References to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are lost on most 5-year olds.
#14. Props for his "disappearing" trick: a moving van and your wide-screen
TV.
#13. Scares the holy hell outta the kids during the "Severed Limb" trick.
#12. Tells the kids he killed Barney in a blood match in Newark.
#11. Didn't bring any balloons, but manages to twist your dachshund into
other animal shapes.
#10. Prefaces each trick with, "here's a little number I learned in the
joint."
#9. Not exactly the Peewee Herman impression you were expecting.
#8. Wears a T-Shirt that says, "Drug-free since March!"
#7. More interested in squirting seltzer into his Scotch than into his
pants.
#6. Those huge ears look too darn life-like, and the entire act consists of
showing charts and complaining about the deficit.
#5. A sad clown is one thing -- a clown who spends the entire party with a
gun to his temple is another thing entirely.
#4. Only balloon animals he can make are a snake and a "snake on acid."
#3. Business cards include the phrase "From the Mind of Stephen King..."
#2. Price list includes "lap dance" and "around the world."
#1. All the balloon animals are ribbed and lubricated.
http://www.splitfeed.net/sin-inc/clown.htm
--------------------------------
Nietzche and Shakespeare
http://www.columbia.edu/~fs10/nietzsch.htm
The inability to love refers to the fact that a demoralized person cares
very little for life itself. It is impossible to love a partner if each day
seems to be a bowl of ashes. Seeing life as absurd suggests that persons
with an existential neurosis tend to look on life as if it is a practical
joke played on people by a cosmic clown. Everything and all behavior is
folly and in the end leads to nothing. Life itself is unnecessary and not
needed in the general scheme of the universe.
Whenever you see him he’s always laughing
A smile eternally on his face
Forever cracking jokes with friends
It’s hard to keep up his pace
But look behind that smile
To his sad and empty life
His smile is but a façade
Since he lost his beloved wife
He puts on his smile like makeup
To hide how he really feels
It’s only at her graveside
That his true emotions are revealed
For there he is sad and sombre
Only there will he shed a tear
For beneath the ground lays his life and his heart
His pretences disappear
So when you see him gaily laughing
Don’t think him cold hearted and unfeeling
For it’s not but a show that he puts on
To hide how he’s really feeling….
....................................
No One Came
Maybe it's because I'm only starting
That I think it won't take too long
Maybe it's because I can see you laughing
That I think you've got it wrong
Maybe I could be like Robin Hood
Like and outlaw dressed all in green
Someone said what's he gonna turn out like
And someone else said never mind
Well I was big and bold and more than twice as old
As all the cats I'd ever seen
I grew my hair and bought a suit
Of shiny white or was it cream
I shook and shivered danced and quivered
And stood on a mountain top
No one came from miles around and said
Man your music is really hot
Well I knew what they meant because I was a freak
My throat was tired and worn
My pretty face just looked out of place
As they poured on the scorn
I wrote on yellow paper from a man who was the king
He said my boy we'll have some crazy scenes
There weren't any scenes at all like he was talkin' about
He must've been the king of queens
Well I could write a million songs about the things I've done
But I could never sing them so they'd never get sung
There's a law for the rich and one for the poor
and there's another one for singers
It's die young and live much longer
Spend your money and sit and wonder
No-one came for miles around
And said man your music is really funky
I believe that I must tell the truth
And say things as they really are
But if I told the truth and nothing but the truth
Could I ever be a star
Nobody knows who's real and who's fakin'
Everyone's shouting out loud
It's only the [Glitter] and [Shine] that gets thru
Where's my Robin Hood outfit
Well I've come and I've gone before you wink an eye
No-one ever care enough to say goodbye
The money's good and the time you have
Fun and games galore
But you spend your money and lie in bed forgotten
And you wonder what you did it for
No-one came from miles around
And said man who's he?
www.thehighwaystar.com/rosas/lyrics/lyrics.html
>
Frederick
We are matter zombies with qualia manifestly added.
Immortalist
What do you mean by "manifestly?"