antw. Re: What is Fluck talking about?

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 + dear tess,

 you're right, hegel calls the bougeois society "the spiritual kingdom of 
 animals" (part C (AA) C. a of the "phänomenologie des geistes", 1807, his 
 wildest and best book), and the late hegel was a supporter of the strong state. 
 enlighment/revolution is to him a necessary phase of history, however, and be 
 it just for the fulfilment of the reformation. the young hegel, who studied 
 theology with schelling ("architecture is frozen music") and hölderlin at the 
 tübinger stift, danced drunkenly around the may-tree each year to celebrate the 
 french revolution.... what i would really like to know: did melville actually 
 read german philosophers? i know (better: so i hear) that melville learned a 
 lot during his ship-travel to london in oktober 1849 from the talks he had with 
 george adler (1821-1868), a jewish guy with german roots who translated 
 goethe's "iphigenie auf tauris" (terrible play, btw) into american english.  
 later he collapsed mentally and it's possible that melville was inspired by  
 adler's fate when he wrote "bartleby". but up to now i couldn't find any source 
 telling me what melville actually read in the field of philosophy. do you know 
 more about this? ... "thus we were weaving and weaving away when i started at a 
 sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthyly, that the ball 
 of free will dropped from my hand, and i stood gazing up at the clouds whence 
 that voice dropped like a wing ..." (ch. 47) ... yours, kai *



tess marek schrieb:

> Ah, but the Platonist, as we discover in Moby-Dick,
> becomes a Gnostic Satan and has no place in America.

> Ahab, like Blicero, wants to break on through to the
> other side. And what will he find there? A platonist
> can know the truth, the forms. But America is a bit
> more Kantian. The supersensual is unkowable. (recall
> that Ahab hoists two whale heads on his ship--[Locke]'s 
> and Kant's. Kant is nearly pure Aristotle but for his
> platonic reality. American pragmatism is likewise pure
> Aristotle but it rejects the the
> platonic/neo-platonic-Catholic/Kantian reality while
> embracing the creative individualism of the Sophists. 

> Platonism is rejected.  Well, Catholicism, but America
> is and was as Anti-Catholic as she was and is the Seat
> of Individualism. Hegel, (1770-1831. German
> philosopher who proposed that truth is reached by a
> continuing dialectic. His major works include
> Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) and
> The Philosophy of Right (1821)), aspires to set man
> (Individual man) on the iron tracks of science by
> traversing the course of the Universal Spirit to the
> Station of Science. Hegel, being one of those
> Europeans I spoke of, rejected Individualism:  Human
> history in general is the progressive move from
> bondage to freedom. Such
> freedom is achieved only as the partial and incomplete
> desires of the one are overcome and integrated
> into the **unified system of the State** in which the
> will of one is replaced by the will of all. In this
> doctrine of the priority of the state, Hegel rejected
> the individualism expressed in the American
> Revolution. Such individualism runs directly contrary
> to the nature of humanity and reality, for the
> individual has value and reality only as a part of a
> greater and unified whole. 

> Part of the Unified whole? hmmm, sounds kinda Eastern
> to my ear, Platonic, Catholic. But in America,
> Jefferson, Emerson, Throreau, Wicks Cherrycoke, 
> turning East would also we a turning West, Davey
> Crocket, Boone, Mason and Dixon...and would celebrate
> the Self, would Sing the Self, would become a
> masculine Individualism that would either sink in
> defiant rejection of kingly power or discover some way
> to wed itself in brotherhood to the Other. Misreading
> this marriage as homosexual (in GR or M-D) is a
> misreading of American Individualism. 

> "I own the speachless, placeless power; but to the
> last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its
> unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the
> midstof the personified inpersonal, a personality
> stand here." 
>  --Ahab, M-D.416NB

> An American personality, but to be complete it must be
> married. Ah Humanity!