plus re the need for narrative and the relatively recent return to family as a good...it's kind of any narrative as long as it's not a metanarrative, innit? by all means have YOUR journey..YOUR story but forget the idea that there is wider story ( by which predictably i mean the end of history) i'm not suggesting you can't have both micro and meta narratives but my feeling is that when one is vanquished the other has to carry too much weight...
I dunno. I think that when you get to 70, you'll just want to have people around you, and, if you're lucky, look after you.
As for meta narratives, I'll just trot out my familar Spenglerian line about the Western mind being inherently eshatological, and all its meta narratives being essentially the same.
raising the question then of how to live in a de-eshatologized time...surely in spenglerian terms it's roughly the same as being alinated from your "species being"...
Apparently the Hellenic Greeks lived in an endless present, without clocks or even calendars. They just judged the time of day by the length of the shadows (even their sundials were ungradiated).
Even their concept of memory was supposedly different to ours. Whereas we see "memory" as proof that an event definitely happened in the past, they saw it as evidence of an ever-lasting present. Their spatial concepts were different too - they had no concept of the horizon.
Goethe was reputed to be very envious of their freedom from the Western conceptions of time and space.
Of course, without marked time and space you can't have capitalism (i.e. interest payments over set periods) and you therefore can't have communism either.
Therefore the Hellenic "species being" was completely different - whereas we exist as points in space, they existed as bounded wholes. This is why they considered zero, infinity and fractions as "irrational numbers", and punished their usage with exile or death.
funny you should mention this as i was wondering the other day why we didn't stop using calendar time and revert back to marking things by rulers/epochs etc.. ie.. it was in the third year of the rule of Cameron etc...
Rossikovsky - "Even their concept of memory was supposedly different to ours. Whereas we see "memory" as proof that an event definitely happened in the past, they saw it as evidence of an ever-lasting present. "
I like the sound of that -- any pointers to literature on it?
Yeah, inevitably "The Decline Of The West" by Oswald Spengler. If as many people read this as read Marx, Nietszche and Heidegger, there might actually be a useful consensus develop as to what's happening around us, and what to do about it. It would make a nice change to all the useless yelping about those pointless sub-historical actors otherwise known as "The Tories" or "New Labour".
Anyway, I digress. From Spengler's own introduction:
"But the Classical culture possessed no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classical man - so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our own - is something different, since past and future, as arraying perspectives in working consciousness, are absent and the "Pure Present", which so often aroused Goethe's admiration in every product of Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.
"Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that chime both day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is capable. In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word "era" received the (Babylonian) significance of "hour"; prior to that there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sundials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to Plato to introduce a practically useful from of clepsydra, and this was merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influcenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree."
16 comments:
Is this metaphorical?
how do you mean?
carl
Wasn't sure if it was direct message to someone, or relating to a wider issue.
never get married! stay single...literally.
Get married and have kids. Everybody's life needs a narrative.
I'll offer the opposite view to what I had in my 20s: even a bad marriage is better than never marrying.
having kids is great
marriage as the lesser of two evils, eh?
plus re the need for narrative and the relatively recent return to family as a good...it's kind of any narrative as long as it's not a metanarrative, innit? by all means have YOUR journey..YOUR story but forget the idea that there is wider story ( by which predictably i mean the end of history) i'm not suggesting you can't have both micro and meta narratives but my feeling is that when one is vanquished the other has to carry too much weight...
I dunno. I think that when you get to 70, you'll just want to have people around you, and, if you're lucky, look after you.
As for meta narratives, I'll just trot out my familar Spenglerian line about the Western mind being inherently eshatological, and all its meta narratives being essentially the same.
It's good to have someone experiencing the metanarrative with you. Continuity gives it momentum. Otherwise it's just 'tears in the rain'...
raising the question then of how to live in a de-eshatologized time...surely in spenglerian terms it's roughly the same as being alinated from your "species being"...
Apparently the Hellenic Greeks lived in an endless present, without clocks or even calendars. They just judged the time of day by the length of the shadows (even their sundials were ungradiated).
Even their concept of memory was supposedly different to ours. Whereas we see "memory" as proof that an event definitely happened in the past, they saw it as evidence of an ever-lasting present. Their spatial concepts were different too - they had no concept of the horizon.
Goethe was reputed to be very envious of their freedom from the Western conceptions of time and space.
Of course, without marked time and space you can't have capitalism (i.e. interest payments over set periods) and you therefore can't have communism either.
Therefore the Hellenic "species being" was completely different - whereas we exist as points in space, they existed as bounded wholes. This is why they considered zero, infinity and fractions as "irrational numbers", and punished their usage with exile or death.
funny you should mention this as i was wondering the other day why we didn't stop using calendar time and revert back to marking things by rulers/epochs etc.. ie.. it was in the third year of the rule of Cameron etc...
As long as we get to say "Hey, nonny nonny" occasionally, I'll be happy.
Rossikovsky - "Even their concept of memory was supposedly different to ours. Whereas we see "memory" as proof that an event definitely happened in the past, they saw it as evidence of an ever-lasting present. "
I like the sound of that -- any pointers to literature on it?
Yeah, inevitably "The Decline Of The West" by Oswald Spengler. If as many people read this as read Marx, Nietszche and Heidegger, there might actually be a useful consensus develop as to what's happening around us, and what to do about it. It would make a nice change to all the useless yelping about those pointless sub-historical actors otherwise known as "The Tories" or "New Labour".
Anyway, I digress. From Spengler's own introduction:
"But the Classical culture possessed no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classical man - so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our own - is something different, since past and future, as arraying perspectives in working consciousness, are absent and the "Pure Present", which so often aroused Goethe's admiration in every product of Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.
"Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of countless clock towers that chime both day and night over West Europe are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is capable. In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that the word "era" received the (Babylonian) significance of "hour"; prior to that there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks and sundials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was left to Plato to introduce a practically useful from of clepsydra, and this was merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influcenced the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree."
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