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Notes From The German Genius
« on: July 19, 2014, 08:46:00 pm »
[Using the message boards PRINT option, these notes are only about 6 or 7 pages.  The book these notes were taken from was about 900 pages.  These notes can being printed and carried around in one's pocket.  It's good sneaky-reading.]


The German Genius

Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (2010)

Some quotes found before the main text and on the cover:

“The word ‘genius’ in German has a special overtone, even a tinge of the demonic, a mysterious power and energy; a genius – whether artist or scientist – is considered to have a special vulnerability, a precariousness, a life of constant risk and often close to troubled turmoil.”  ~ Fritz Stern

“The Germans dive deep – but they come up muddier.”  ~ Wickham Steed

“For those [Germans] born during and after the Second World War the cultural history of Germany before 1933 is that of a lost country, one that they never knew.”  ~ Keith Bullivant

“For countless Americans, Germany remains the ultimate metaphor of evil, the frightening reminder of the fragility of civilization.”  ~ Deidre Berger

“The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life.  He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth … In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men.”  ~ Adolf Hitler

“People in England want something to read, the French something to taste, the Germans something to think about.”  ~ Kurt Tucholsky

“The Planet is in flames … Only from the Germans can come the world-historical reflection, provided that they find and preserve their German element.”  ~ Martin Heidegger

“The Allies won [the second world war] because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”  ~ Sir Ian Jacobs, Military Secretary to Churchill

“We poor Germans!  We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are ‘famous’ !  No one really likes us.”  ~ Thomas Mann

“Hitler was ‘the inner mirror’ of every German’s unconscious … the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul.”  ~ Carl Jung

“No one is a Nazi, no one ever was … It should be set to music.”  ~ Noel Annan

“More Aryans than Jews were killed in the death camps.”  ~ from Historikerstreit, the “historians’ dispute” (Ernst Nolte – student of Heidegger)


Notes: The First 200 Pages


Peter Watson maintains that Hitler and the Holocaust are preoccupying the world to such an extent that we are denying ourselves important aspects elsewhere in German history.  How true.

___________________________________________________________________

Notes From the Introduction


p.30

Germany went from being a poor relation among Western countries, intellectually speaking, to the dominant force – more influential in the realm of ideas than France or Britain or Italy or the Netherlands, more so even than the United States.  This remarkable transformation [between 1754 and 1933] is the subject of The German Genius.


p.31

Peter Watson cautions the reader to understand there is a huge difference between culture and civilization (to Germans):  Politics and the affairs of the state represented the area of their humiliation and lack of freedom, while culture represented the sphere of their freedom and their pride.

There is a German obsession for distinguishing between “civilization” and “culture.”  In German usage, Zivilisation means something that is indeed useful, but nevertheless only something of value of the second rank, comprising only the outer appearance of human beings, the surface of human existence.  The word through which Germans interpret themselves, which more than any other expresses their pride (in their own being), is Kultur.

Whereas the French as well as the English concept of culture can also refer to politics and to economics, to technology and to sports, to moral and to social facts, the German concept of Kultur refers essentially to intellectual, artistic and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts of this sort, on the one side, and political, economic, and social facts, on the other.

This division, between Kultur and Zivilisation, was underlined by a second opposition, that between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavor and the realm of power and political control.


p.34

Thomas Mann wrote, “Interested in metaphysics, poetry and music but not in voting rights or the proper procedures of the parliamentary system, for them Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was a more radical act than the proclamation of the rights of man.”


p.35

The German genius was cut off in its prime.  All the world knows WHY this happened.  Much less well known is why and how the Germans acheived the pre-eminence they did.  Yes, people know that Germany lost a lot of talent under the Nazis (60,000 writers, artists, musicians, and scientists sent either into exile or to the death camps by 1939).  But even many Germans appear to have forgotten that their country was such a dominant power intellectually until 1933.



Notes From PART I: The Great Turn In German Life



p.53

Bildung. Difficult to translate, in essence it refers to the inner development of the individual, a process of fulfillment through education and knowledge, an amalgam of wisdom and self-realization.

amalgam – a mixture of different elements

Bildung – true (inner) freedom



Notes From PART II: Third Renaissance Between Doubt and Darwin


The Origins of Modern Scholarship

p.110

Bildung – true (inner) freedom – involved three things:  Zwecklosigkeit, Innerlichkeit, and Wissenschaftlichkeit (non-purposiveness inwardness and scholarliness).


p.120

Goethe had a serious aim.  He had told Caroline Herder that he had lost his belief in divine powers in the summer of 1788 and the purpose of life, when there is no god, is to become, to become much more than one was.

“The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves, which emerges if we continually strengthen our truly human powers, and subjugate the inhumane.”

Some non-Germans have found it too much.

Goethe’s most famous masterpiece is FAUST.  It was by no means a new story, being a well-known medieval legend, made into a play by Christopher Marlowe, though Goethe wasn’t aware of Marlowe’s work until he had written more than half of his version.  It took him sixty (60!) years to complete.

The legend [of Doctor Faust] may be grounded in fact.  There was a Georg Faust alive at the turn of the 16th century (1500) who wandered through central Europe claiming to possess recondite forms of knowledge which gave him special healing powers.

recondite – (1) hidden from sight : concealed; (2) difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : deep; (3) of, relating to, or dealing with something little known or obscure

After his death he gradually acquired a slight change of name and an academic title, as Dr. Johannes Faustus, a professor at Wittenberg.  In his lectures, he was alleged to “conjure up at will personages from classical Greece, and he was notorious for allegedly playing tricks on both the pope and the emperor.

According to the legend, Faust becomes disillusioned with the many forms of secret knowledge he has tried out, and the devil, Mephistopheles, makes a wager with God that he can tempt Faust into his world.



New Light on the Structure of the Mind


Kant had introduced a rigorous new way of observing, of observing ourselves.  While this sometimes got out of hand, this observation of ourselves, the concentration on subjective universality, consciousness and self-consciousness, was the real beginning of modern psychology.

It is one reason why the unconscious, and with it the therapeutic approach to life, was at root a German idea.



The Symphony as Philosophy



p.153

Vocal music was more popular than instrumental music up to the 16th century.  In Italy rose the first organ school.  Germans visited Venice to learn from the masters there.  From this rose Bach, Leipzig, Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Beethoven (1770-1827), Haydn, etc. Music was very much influenced by Idealistic Philosophy.


p.171

Modern math begins with Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who was much influenced by Kant.  Kant’s arguments implied that mathematics was an aspect of the imagination and, therefore, a form of freedom.

Number patterns don’t have to be useful.  The masses don’t have to understand WHY prime numbers are so fascinating or WHY it is so important to understand their behavior.  Because of this, mathematicians are destined to inhabit their own private, solitary worlds.  Gauss kept a mathematical diary.  Gauss never published his ideas and the friends this troubled man sharded his thoughts with were sworn to secrecy.  Not only did Gauss recognize the pattern of prime numbers, but, according to his mathematical diary, Gauss was still quite young when he began to consider that the ancient Greeks – Euclid in particular – had got it wrong with some of their fundamental axioms in geometry.  In particular, he began to have doubts about parallel lines.

It occurred to Gauss that three-dimensional space might be curved in the way that the two-dimensional surface of the earth was.  Lines of longitude all meet at the poles.  They appear parallel, but they are not.  Noncommunative algebra refers to the posibility that, in mathematics, xy, strange as it may seem, is not always equal to yx.  “Rightness” and “leftness” determine chemical properties.  This, plus the second law of thermodynamics, which says that time is a fundamental aspect of space, shows that a purely mechanical (i.e., Newtonian) understanding of the universe has to be incomplete.  Gauss’s noncommunative algebra was an early attempt to come to grips with this problem.

Speculative philosophy had a special status at the turn of the 18th to 19th century (1800) because Europe was in an intellectual time between doubt and Darwin.  There was a small closed circle of German Romantics.  Schopenhauer was outside this circle of Young Hegelians.  Hegel died in 1831, Goethe died in 1832.  Enter “The Young Hegelians.”  Enter Karl Marx (1818-1883) who was greatly influenced by Feurbach.

Feurbach produced in Marx the conception of man “as a being whose very essence is modified by his contact with nature and his fellow men in society.”  This is how Marx, following Feurbach, came to regard Hegel’s conception of alienation as central.  Moses Hess, also a Young Hegelian, insisted that “money is the worth of men expressed in figures, the hallmark of our slavery.”

For Marx, “Money is the jealous God of Israel beside which no other God may exist.”
« Last Edit: July 21, 2014, 07:37:27 am by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2014, 08:49:18 pm »
The Rise of the Unconscious


p.192

The Oriental renaissance played a vital role in the origins of the Romantic Movement.  It seemed to German scholars of the time that the Aryan/Indian/Persian tradition linked with the original barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire from the East and, together with the myths of the Scandinavians, provided an alternative (more northerly) tradition to the Greek and Latin Mediterranean classicism that had dominated European life and thought for the previous 2,500 years.  Ancestral mythology could be “the childhood dreams of our species.”  Original Indian scriptures were written in poetry.  Poetry was “the mother tongue.”  Man is the animal that sings.

Heinrich Heine wrote, “Our lyrics are aimed at singing the Orient.”  The source of all religion can be found “in the unconscious or in the Orient, from whence all religions came.”


p.194

Now, Kant’s great contribution was to grasp that it is the mind that shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomenon in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between “I” and “not I.”  Reason is inadequate.

To find out what I must do in a given situation, I must listen to “an inner voice.”  The inner voice does not conform to science.  Its commands are not necessarily facts at all, and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false.  The purpose of the inner voice is to set someone a value, and this has nothing to do with science, but is created by the individual.  It was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and totally new.


p.195

The rival ways of looking at the world – the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist – constitute the modern incoherence.  France [the bully of Europe], ruled by Napolean, conquered peoples of Austria, Prussia, and several smaller German states.  In response, many German-speaking people turned inward to intellectual ideas as a way to unite and inspire their people.  “Romanticism” is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the 18th century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe.

For Schelling (1775-1854) the world consisted of phenomena which varied in their degree of self-consciousness, from total unconsciousness, gradually coming to full consciousness of themselves.  At its most fundamental, there are the brute rocks that form the earth, which represent the “will” in a condition of total unconsciousness.  Gradually, life infuses them, producing the first biological species.  Plants and animals follow, self-consciousness growing, leading to the realization of some kind of purpose.

Nature represents progressive stages of the will and its striving toward something “but is not aware what it strives for.”

Benjamin W. Wells wrote:

    DER GRÜNE HEINRICH, “Green Henry” (1854) is a psychic autobiography of Gottfried Keller in the same sense and with the same limitations as ‘Werther’ or ‘Wilhelm Meister’ is of Goethe.   Truth is freely mingled with fiction, and there is a generalizing purpose to exhibit the psychic disease that affected the whole generation of the transition from romanticism to realism in life and art.

After his father’s death, Keller’s family lived in constant poverty, and, because of Keller’s difficulties with his teachers, in continual disagreement with school authorities. Keller later gave a good rendering of his experiences in this period in his long novel, Der grüne Heinrich (1850-55; 2nd version, 1879). His mother seems to have brought him up in as carefree a condition as possible, sparing for him from her scanty meals, and allowing him the greatest possible liberty in the disposition of his time, the choice of a calling, etc.


p.296

Gottfried Keller was concerned with the cultural contradictions of capitalism.  How can one live a fulfilled life in such a society?  It may be impossible. The radical turmoil that existed in the “hungry forties” (1840′s) produced a foretaste of revolution in Germany in 1844, when Silesian weavers mounted an insurrection.  Reduced to starvation, their uprising was quickly put down.  This inspired Heinrich Heine’s bitter proletarian poem, “Die schlesischen Weber” (The Silesian Weavers), which would resonate throughout Germany down the next century.

note: Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was famously ambivalent about his “Jewishness.”  He said he was German first.  In 1924 he described himself as, “One of the most German beasts in existence … my breast is an archive of German feeling.”

Heinrich Heine described the Anti-Semitism of his era as “more economic than religious.”  Heine challenged “God” head-on:

    Drop those holy parables and Pietist hypotheses:

    Answer us these damning questions – No evasions, if you please


From his mattress/grave, he tells us that poetry can be no help in this desolate world.  We have entered the age of prose.

Georg Buchner (1813-1837) had always been interested in politics and, appalled by the conditions of his environs, helped to form a secret society dedicated to revolution.  He longed for the poor to attain self-consciousness.  In Buchner’s day, the proletarian were not yet a class.  He was forced into exile when one of his pamphlets was judged to be incendiary.
His story/play, Woyzeck, based on true events, tells the story of a common soldier driven mad – and to suicide – by unyielding military discipline and strict hierarchal societies where “Man is an abyss; you get dizzy when you look down.”

The play, based on the life of J.C. Woyzecjk, is a savage indictment of the social conditions existing in Germany with the new forms of poverty caused by INDUSTRIALIZATION, with individuals all pitted against each other, and the “fundamental ignorance of most people about the psychological pressures that can exist in simply getting through the day.”
« Last Edit: July 21, 2014, 08:22:10 am by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2014, 08:51:09 pm »
The Miseries of Modernity


p.336

Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had a great interest in music – his great pleasures centering on Schumann, Schopenhauer, and solitary walks.  He paralleled Wagner in that it was his discovery of Schopenhauer that proved to be the intellectual turning point of his life.


p.339

The Ubermenssh (Superman) would be free to take full advantage of the fact that there is no soul, no God, no transcendental realm, no world other than this.  There are no other rewards than the joy of being.  The meaning of life is life itself.  The will-to-live, to assert one’s presence in the world, to sweep aside all obsticles – Nietzsche called this “the will to power.”   We can see how clearly this turns Schopenhauer on his head and comprises the radical mutation of the notion of Bildung.

Since the noumenal realm doesn’t exist, our “oneness” with it cannot exist either, and therefore our compassion that arises from it, and forms the foundation of morality,  cannot exist either.  Morality stems from self-interest, and there is absolutely no place for compassion.

Note about what came between Wagner and Nietzsche:  A doctor told Wagner about Nietzsche’s “chronic ****.”  The same doctor had advised Nietzsche to go to prostitutes to relieve his sexual frustrations rather than autoeroticism.  This is how Nietzsche contracted a sexually transmitted disease and “went insane.”



The Aryan Mystique:  Finns call them “Saxon,” Russians and Poles call them “Niemcy or Swabians,” the British call them “Germans,” the French call them “Allemands,” the Itlians call them “Tedeschi,” and they call themselves “Deutsche.”


Christopher Meiners (1745-1810) – the first to advance the theory that mankind had its origins in Africa, and who saw a sort of progress from orangutans to Negroes, to Slavs, to Germans.  But his views were overtaken by the Romantics: “Everything is of Indian origin” and “Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.  Schopenhauer was sympathetic and it was around this time that the term “Aryan” began to be used, having been originally borrowed from Herodotus to designate Persians or Medes … Direct link from India .


p.430

By 1860 the distinction between Aryans and Semites had become accepted right across Europe.  The word was used by both Darwin and Nietzsche.

______________________________________________________________________________

p.722

Herbert Marcuse’s remedy was “the great refusal,” the “negation” of the reality that technological rationality has foisted on us.



The Dangers of Inwardness



Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche identified the disenchantment of mass-industrialized modern capitalist consumer society.  We are surrounded by criminal violence, drug abuse, child abuse, high-school massacres, gangland vendettas, piracy on the high seas, and sexual slavery.  There are more people in prison and mental hospitals than ever before, vandalism is widespread, and alcoholism is rampant.  These are all responses to the NIHILISTIC EXISTENTIAL landscapes of modern life, by people who, though they may never have read Nietzsche or Weber, nevertheless experience themselves trapped in an empty, cold, bleak terrain these German speakers identified.  The incoherence of their response is part of the condition.  We inhabit a nihilistic world.

The artist who creates from within is the most advanced type of human being.

Kant’s instinct and intuition, Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s will, Freud’s and Jung’s “unconscious” are all “inner” entities, inner concepts.

[Here we have] the opposition of the “authentic private self, an untainted Innerlichkeit versus a superficial, even hypocriticsal public sphere.”

So, how does one escape from or transcend the inauthentic world of opinions (part of the entertainment industry)?


p.841

Hannah Arendt said that only educated people can have a private life.  People without a private life soon become a mob, where everything that seems to matter takes place in the streets.


p.847

We don’t have bodies.  We are bodies.  This is a Heideggerian distinction … The way we choose to go forward in understanding reality is a philosophical matter, not a scientific-psychiatric-technical matter.  As global warming starts to lay waste our planet, as the rain forests and ice-caps shrink together, as inland seas disappear, as genocide and famine continue to ravage Africa, as India and China begin to run out of water, does it not ring ever more true that Heidegger had a profound point when he said we should stop trying to exploit and control the world with our technological brilliance?

The way out of our dilemma, the Germans tell us, is not technical or scientific, but philosophical.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2014, 10:55:53 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2014, 07:44:12 am »
Some words/ideas I want to focus on as I drift through the days:

This division, between Kultur and Zivilisation, was underlined by a second opposition, that between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavor and the realm of power and political control.

I lean strongly in the direction of Kultur (as opposed to Zivilisation) and Geist as opposed to Macht.


Bildung – true (inner) freedom – involved three things:  Zwecklosigkeit, Innerlichkeit, and Wissenschaftlichkeit (non-purposiveness inwardness and scholarliness).

Zwecklosigkeit = "non-purosiveness" ---> what to do with one's life on earth?  Nothing.

Innerlichkeit = "inwardness" ---> talking to myself

Wissenschaftlichkeit = "scholariness" ---> enjoying one's higher mental faculties as an end in itself.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2015, 06:59:58 pm »
Quote from: Christa Buschendorf
Schopenhauer in the Air

Not long after Sadakichi Hartmann had published a volume of seven short stories under the title Schopenhauer in the Air (1899),
(1) yet another German philosopher rose to fame in the United States, and in 1907 James Huneker, considering himself "the first Nietzschian [sic] to write of him in this country," could claim "Nietzsche is in the air."

(2) But by the time the United States entered World War I, the strong impact of German thought on American intellectual life abruptly came to an end. While the field of nineteenth-century intellectual history abounds in studies documenting the vitality of German-American philosophical exchanges, the American reception of Arthur Schopenhaner has not received much attention.

(3) Given his common designation as a pessimist, who with apodictic certainty had declared our world the worst of all possible, Schopenhauer's neglect among historians of a nation known for its unshakable optimism cannot come as a surprise. In fact, one might question whether Schopenhauer had ever been 'in the air' in the United States. Compared to the stir the German philosopher caused in Europe and the sheer number of devoted followers he generated on the continent, his American reception is undoubtedly smaller in scope and different in manner. However, this does not make it any less significant. As Thomas Tweed maintained in his study on the American Encounter with Buddhism: "Sometimes it is necessary to turn one's gaze away from an object [the dominant culture of nineteenth-century America] in order to see it clearly, to examine the exotic in order to understand the familiar" (Tweed xxii).

The following essay draws on my book-length study on the American reception of Schopenhauer, "The Highpriest of Pessimism" (2008). After first presenting Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Henry Hedge as typical examples of the early American reception of Schopenhauer, I then take a brief look at the American reaction to pessimism at the end of the nineteenth century, and finally I compare William James' response to that of Emerson. As I will suggest, both intellectuals grappled with a philosophy known for its undaunted outlook onto the dark sides of life.


The New Buddhist

When Emerson encountered Schopenhauer on 13 May 1864 on the front page of the New York Commercial Advertiser in an unsigned article on "Buddhism in Europe. Schopenhauer," the German thinker was introduced as a "new Buddhist."
« Last Edit: February 19, 2015, 07:03:52 pm by H »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~


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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2015, 10:09:24 am »
A great documentary.If you haven't watched it already, do watch it.By the way,how frequently do you read WWR?
« Last Edit: February 20, 2015, 10:33:38 am by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #7 on: February 20, 2015, 05:34:49 pm »
I can just imagine the child Arthur sitting through those sermons ... imagine him complaining vehemently to his parents. 

I don't pick up the actual text, World as Will and Representation, daily, but I do find myself mapping "modern" terminology back to Schopenhauer's terminology, which itself maps back to the ancients.  There doesn't appear to be anything new under the sun. 

Progress is a rhetorical illusion.  My mother is often beset with envy witnessing her siblings traveling around the world, dining in hotel restaurants and photographing themselves in foreign lands.  I remind her that we carry the self-same existence wherever we go, the same Being that has existed throughout all the ages, in every culture ... What is there to existence?  Nothing is exotic.  We have to feed the growling tubes.  We have to keep from dying of hypothermia.  We have our sexual impulse.  Of course, if we are warm and dry and fed, we then have to endure the boredom of a being thrown into this seemingly meaningless and redundant predicament.

So, while I may not refer to Schopenhauer's magnum opus daily, nearly every moment of my conscious awareness is comparing notes with his observations, verifying ... 

At some point I began to suspect that Schopenhauer's genius entailed having the ability to articulate things that we all must think on some level.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #8 on: February 25, 2015, 07:28:25 pm »
Stop Smiling: Did studying anthropology at the University of Chicago lead you to become an atheist?

Kurt Vonnegut: No. I’m descended from boatloads of Germans who arrived about the time of the Civil War. They were so called “free thinkers.” They were educated people who decided that the priest or the preacher didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to the origin of things. It was largely influenced by Darwin. They formed clubs and picnics, calling themselves free thinkers. But in two World Wars, German-Americans were so hated and the free thinkers were so specifically German, they stopped calling themselves that.

 :-X
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #9 on: May 26, 2023, 01:56:08 pm »
While scanning for material for contemplation experiments, then scanning within this thread for information about the actual Faust who the legend is based on, I came across the following:

Goethe’s most famous masterpiece is FAUST.  It was by no means a new story, being a well-known medieval legend, made into a play by Christopher Marlowe, though Goethe wasn’t aware of Marlowe’s work until he had written more than half of his version.  It took him sixty (60!) years to complete.

The legend [of Doctor Faust] may be grounded in fact.  There was a Georg Faust alive at the turn of the 16th century (1500) who wandered through central Europe claiming to possess recondite forms of knowledge which gave him special healing powers.

recondite – (1) hidden from sight : concealed; (2) difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : deep; (3) of, relating to, or dealing with something little known or obscure

After his death he gradually acquired a slight change of name and an academic title, as Dr. Johannes Faustus, a professor at Wittenberg.  In his lectures, he was alleged to “conjure up at will personages from classical Greece, and he was notorious for allegedly playing tricks on both the pope and the emperor.

According to the legend, Faust becomes disillusioned with the many forms of secret knowledge he has tried out, and the devil, Mephistopheles, makes a wager with God that he can tempt Faust into his world.



New Light on the Structure of the Mind


Kant had introduced a rigorous new way of observing, of observing ourselves.  While this sometimes got out of hand, this observation of ourselves, the concentration on subjective universality, consciousness and self-consciousness, was the real beginning of modern psychology.

It is one reason why the unconscious, and with it the therapeutic approach to life, was at root a German idea.

p.171

Modern math begins with Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who was much influenced by Kant.  Kant’s arguments implied that mathematics was an aspect of the imagination and, therefore, a form of freedom.

Number patterns don’t have to be useful.  The masses don’t have to understand WHY prime numbers are so fascinating or WHY it is so important to understand their behavior.  Because of this, mathematicians are destined to inhabit their own private, solitary worlds.  Gauss kept a mathematical diary.  Gauss never published his ideas and the friends this troubled man shared his thoughts with were sworn to secrecy.  Not only did Gauss recognize the pattern of prime numbers, but, according to his mathematical diary, Gauss was still quite young when he began to consider that the ancient Greeks – Euclid in particular – had got it wrong with some of their fundamental axioms in geometry.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Notes From The German Genius
« Reply #10 on: May 28, 2023, 01:03:30 am »
We must make sure that we clarify that Kant never used the word "imagination" ( and freedom for that matter-regulative but not genuinely real)in the way it is used today in the everyday conversations.

He used the term in a very precise and technical way.

While he did believe mathematics is subjective i.e. no mathematics without a subject, neither Kant nor Schopenhauer , would then go ahead and say that one is free to imagine all sorts of mathematics without any rhyme or reason.

Romanticism and Transcendentalism(think Emerson and all) are talking tosh when they claim to arise out of Kant's thought.

Also, we are not sure if Gauss would have seen himself as the mathematical counterpart of Coleridge.

The subject " creates"mathematics bit that "creation" itself is determined and not "free".
« Last Edit: May 28, 2023, 01:27:21 am by Holden »
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