Can you think of a different reason why perpetual motion machines would be impossible? — flannel jesus
What about friction, heat loss, things like that? When a machine loses energy, it doesn't just lose it into the void, it gets transferred to other things in its immediate environment.
The concept of energy doesn't dictate that energy is really lost, if you want to relate entropy to energy, entropy is more about patterns of distribution of energy. — flannel jesus
What about friction, heat loss, things like that? When a machine loses energy, it doesn't just lose it into the void, it gets transferred to other things in its immediate environment.
The concept of energy doesn't dictate that energy is really lost, if you want to relate entropy to energy, entropy is more about patterns of distribution of energy. — flannel jesus
Can you think of a different reason why perpetual motion machines would be impossible — flannel jesus
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. — Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, Pg 1
Taking literally the ruthless implications of Nietzsche's anti-democratic thinking—his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics — Maw
The word "Superman," which designates a type of man that would be one of nature's rarest and luckiest strokes...
See how Zarathustra goes down from the mountain and speaks the kindest words to every one! See with what delicate fingers he touches his very adversaries, the priests, and how he suffers with them from themselves! Here, at every moment, man is overcome, and the concept "Superman" becomes the greatest reality,—out of sight, almost far away beneath him, lies all that which heretofore has been called great in man. — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Is the number pi beyond our grasp? — frank
I'm generally opposed to victim searching, where folks go out and try to convince others they are oppressed or downtrodden. — Hanover
The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen.
This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man's capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian who had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word "privacy," and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter-—as it is to the political, properly speaking.
The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related. The striking coincidence of the rise of society with the decline of the family indicates clearly that what actually took place was the absorption of the family unit into corresponding social groups.
It is decisive that society, on all its levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to "normalize" its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.
We find these demands in the salons of high society, whose conventions always equate the individual with his rank within the social framework. What matters is this equation with social status, and it is immateri al whether the framework happens to be actual rank in the half-feud al society of the eighteenth century, title in the class society of the nineteenth, or mere function in the mass society of today. The rise of mass society, on the contrary, only indicates that the various social groups have suffered the same absorption into one society that the family units had suffered earlier; with the emergence of mass society, the realm of the social has finally, after several centuries of development, reached the point where it embraces and controls all members of a given community equally and with equal strength. But society equalizes under all circumstances, and the victory of equality in the modern world is only the political and legal recognition of the fact that society has conquered the public realm, and that distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual. — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
The profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin transla- tion of "political" as "social" is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aquinas compares the nature of household rule with political rule: the head of the household, he finds, has some similarity to the head of the kingdom, but, he adds, his power is not so "perfect" as that of the king. 11 Not only in Greece and the polls but throughout the whole of occidental an- tiquity, it would indeed have been self-evident that even the power of the tyrant was less great, less "perfect" than the power with which the paterfamilias, the dominus, ruled over his household of slaves and family... Although misunderstanding and equating the political and social realms is as old as the translatio n of Greek terms into Latin and their adaption to Roman-Christian thought, it has become even more confusing in modern usage and modem understanding of society.
The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a rela- tively new phenomenon whose or igin coincided with the emer- gence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state. What concerns us in this context is the extraordinary difficulty with which we, because of this development, understand the deci- sive division between the public and private realms, between the sphere of the polls and the sphere of household and family, and, finally, between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life, a division upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic.
In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping. The scien- tific thought that corresponds to this development is no longer political science but " national economy" or "social economy" or Volkswirtschaft, all of which indicate a kind of "collective house-keeping"; 13 the collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family is what we call "society," and its political form of organization is called "nation." 14
We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term "political economy" would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was " eco- nomic," related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition. 16 Historically, it is very likely that the rise of the city-state and the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family and household. 16 Yet the old sanctity of the hearth, though much less pronounced in classical Greece than in ancient Rome, was never entirely lost. What prevented the polis from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold sacred the bound- aries surrounding each property was not respect for private property as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he had no location in it which was properly his own. 17
Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing any contradiction. 18 The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself—the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, "the gods who make us live and nourish our body" 19—which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others. That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household there- fore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it.
The realm of the polls, on the contrary, was the sphere of free- dom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polls. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society —a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of property-owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers, as in Marx, or a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries. In all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government.
What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polls life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenome- non, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world.
This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimmla, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical neces- sity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man- made violence. This twofold and doubled "unhappiness" of slavery is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave. Thus, a poor free man preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing labor market to regular assured wo rk, which, because it restricted his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be servitude (douleia) , and even harsh, painful labor was preferred to the easy life of many household slaves. — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition pg 27-31
The Heaviest Burden.—What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!" If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?— — Nietzsche's Heaviest Burden/Greatest Weight
The book is over 1000 pages, quite meticulous and the arguments powerfully stated; looking beyond Nietzsche's philosophical texts towards his letters and other written material. The book changed my outlook on Nietzsche. Even if you will not fundamentally agree with Losurdo (who does not claim that Nietzsche should be discarded, by any means), I think there is a lot to grapple with. Highly recommend. — Maw
his celebration of slavery, of war and colonial expansion, and eugenics — Maw
although I wouldn't use "predetermined" — wonderer1
“Look at this gateway! Dwarf!” I continued, “it hath two faces. Two roads come together here: these hath no one yet gone to the end of.
This long lane : it continueth for an eternity. And that long lane forward—that is another eternity.
They are antithetical to one another, these roads; they directly abut on one another:—and it is here, at this gateway, that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘This Moment.’
But should one follow them further—and ever further and further on, thinkest thou, dwarf, that these roads would be eternally antithetical?”—
“Everything straight lieth,” murmured the dwarf, contemptuously. “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”
“Thou spirit of gravity!” said I wrathfully, “do not take it too lightly! Or I shall let thee squat where thou squattest, Haltfoot,—and I carried thee HIGH!”
“Observe,” continued I, “This Moment! From the gateway, This Moment, there runneth a long eternal lane BACKWARDS: behind us lieth an eternity.
Must not whatever CAN run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever CAN happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?
And if everything have already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also—have already existed?
And are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? CONSEQUENTLY—itself also?
closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? CONSEQUENTLY—itself also?
For whatever CAN run its course of all things, also in this long lane OUTWARD—MUST it once more run!—
And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must we not all have already existed?
—And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?”— — Nietzsche, TSZ, The Vision (and the Enigma)
No longer shepherd, no longer man—a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that LAUGHED! Never on earth laughed a man as HE laughed! — same as above
it will not tarry — jufa
Dogma imprisons the individual to an exclusively private life; to a life of a foreign subjectivity of their own singular experience. To live an entirely private life would be to deprive things essential to a truly human life....
A philosophy of life which does not arrive, as did Nietzsche, at the affirmation of Eternal Recurrence, as the highest principle of all life simply does not know what it is talking about... — Hannah Arendt
“Bridge” implies you might see the other side just needing a bridge you don’t see to get there. — Fire Ologist