Homer, hyperbole & ad hominem

[Terrance]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
> terrance flaherty schrieb:
> 
> > This illusion of Free Will  enhances Man's
> > feeling of power, but for N, the death of God is also the
> > death of this illusion of power, the death also of the
> > illusion of God's order and most importantly to our V.V.,
> 
> > the death of creativity.
> 
>     nope. see "also sprach zarathustra", vorrede, part 5: "ich sage euch: man
>     muss noch chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden stern zu gebären. ich sage
>     euch: ihr habt noch chaos in euch" (kritische studienausgabe, vol 4: 19). in
>     my clumsy amateur translation this is: "i tell you: one must have chaos
>     inside of oneself to give birth to a dancing star. i tell you: you still
>     have chaos inside of you." a-and the teaching of eternal recurrency is
>     n o t  meant to turn off creativity. actually, it's the other way round:
>     live every moment in such a creative way that it can come back in the future
>     without terrifying you! amor fati: love of fate ...
> 
> kfl //:: ps: if you don't believe me, check out jendris alwast's "die logik der
>          dionysischen revolte"!

Now why wouldn't I believe you? I'm sorry for any confusion
caused. You are talking about Nietzsche's YOU! I was talking
about Free Will and God. 

This illusion of Free Will  enhances Man's
feeling of power, but for N, the death of God is also the
death of this illusion of power, the death also of the
illusion of God's order and most importantly to our V.V.,
the death of creativity. The creative God in N is replaced
by an eternal recurrence: "the whole music box repeats
eternally its tune which may never be called a melody" and
the free will of conscious thinking Man is reduced to an
illusion and surface and sign world, a world made common and
mean by the consciousness of Man, a world corrupted,
falsified, reduced to superficialities, and generalizations,
a world where the instincts and physiological demands are
the engines of our souls.


The creativity here is not the creativity of Man but of God. 

Nietzsche’s first book was published in 1872: The Birth of
Tragedy, Out of the
Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der
Musik). It was
reissued in 1886 with the title The Birth of Tragedy, Or:
Hellenism and Pessimism
(Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und
Pessimismus), and contained a
prefatory essay -- "An Attempt at Self-Criticism" -- which
expressed Nietzsche’s
own critical reflections on his earlier work. The Birth of
Tragedy set forth an
alternative conception to the late 18th/early 19th century
understanding of Greek
culture -- a conception largely inspired by Johann
Winckelmann’s History of
Ancient Art (1764) -- which hailed ancient Greece as the
epitome of noble
simplicity, calm grandeur, clear blue skies, and rational
serenity. Nietzsche, having
by this time absorbed the German romanticist, and
specifically Schopenhauerian,
view that non-rational forces reside at the foundation of
all creativity and of reality
itself, identified a strongly instinctual, wild, amoral,
"Dionysian" energy within
pre-Socratic Greek culture as an essentially creative and
healthy force. Surveying
the history of Western culture since the time of the Greeks,
Nietzsche lamented
over how this "Dionysian," creative energy had been
submerged and weakened as it
became overshadowed by the "Apollonian" forces of logical
order and stiff sobriety.
He concluded that European culture since the time of
Socrates had remained
one-sidedly Apollonian and relatively unhealthy. As a means
towards cultural
rebirth, Nietzsche advocated the resurrection and fuller
release of Dionysian artistic
energies -- those which he associated with primordial
creativity, joy in existence and
ultimate truth. The seeds of this rebirth Nietzsche
perceived in the contemporary
German music of his time, and the concluding part of The
Birth of Tragedy, in
effect, adulates the German artistic spirit as the potential
savior of European culture.