Nietzsche is Dead
I realize the old "Nietzsche is Dead" line is pretty used up, but hey...it's hard to resist.
I was thinking today about Nietzsche and the old Apollonian and Dionysian dichotamy he talked about regarding the Dead Greek Guys and Western Civilization and all that, and my understanding of this is that we tend to historically catagorize eras as being one or the other. Western history is a series of "enlightments" always followed by a kind of "romantic" rebellion against reason as the primary motivating force for behavior and culture and life as we know it.
The way I see our own age is that we are living through a societal identity crisis. To pay my little bit of homage to the Dead Greek Guys, we have very powerful impulses attempting to shape our cultural "ethos" through both "logos" and "pathos" at the same time. We are living through a time that is both an "age of reason" and an "age of romanticism" simultaneously with little sense of harmony between the two. Politically, due to wars and terrorism and rapid change, we lean more to being driven by emotion than logic. Yet, we are also in a time of "media minutiae" in which it's nearly impossible to hold anyone or anything up as heroic, and we have a great desire for ever increasing amounts of information in order to feed our desire for ever increasing claims to rational decision making. But what we are inundated with in the end is not real information. It's merely noise or often enough misinformation, shadows flickering on the walls of the cave. Thus, our loyalties are divided, not so much by what we believe in and what we hold dear, but by how much we feel cheated by the sea of hollow and unreliable factors through which we make both our rational and emotional choices.
Maybe people in every age have felt the same. Maybe we're just more aware of it due to mass communication and transportation. And Mr. Plato, what if the cave is a happy place? What if the shadows are so very entertaining?
This is the part where I should have a concluding thought, but I don't. I'm just taking up blog space to write this down before I forget that I got this far in my current line of thought (read "procrastination").
Embrace the chaos. It's alright. And it's already embraced you.
I was thinking today about Nietzsche and the old Apollonian and Dionysian dichotamy he talked about regarding the Dead Greek Guys and Western Civilization and all that, and my understanding of this is that we tend to historically catagorize eras as being one or the other. Western history is a series of "enlightments" always followed by a kind of "romantic" rebellion against reason as the primary motivating force for behavior and culture and life as we know it.
The way I see our own age is that we are living through a societal identity crisis. To pay my little bit of homage to the Dead Greek Guys, we have very powerful impulses attempting to shape our cultural "ethos" through both "logos" and "pathos" at the same time. We are living through a time that is both an "age of reason" and an "age of romanticism" simultaneously with little sense of harmony between the two. Politically, due to wars and terrorism and rapid change, we lean more to being driven by emotion than logic. Yet, we are also in a time of "media minutiae" in which it's nearly impossible to hold anyone or anything up as heroic, and we have a great desire for ever increasing amounts of information in order to feed our desire for ever increasing claims to rational decision making. But what we are inundated with in the end is not real information. It's merely noise or often enough misinformation, shadows flickering on the walls of the cave. Thus, our loyalties are divided, not so much by what we believe in and what we hold dear, but by how much we feel cheated by the sea of hollow and unreliable factors through which we make both our rational and emotional choices.
Maybe people in every age have felt the same. Maybe we're just more aware of it due to mass communication and transportation. And Mr. Plato, what if the cave is a happy place? What if the shadows are so very entertaining?
This is the part where I should have a concluding thought, but I don't. I'm just taking up blog space to write this down before I forget that I got this far in my current line of thought (read "procrastination").
Embrace the chaos. It's alright. And it's already embraced you.
posted by Sharon Gerald | 6:53 PM
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