Magni Formica Laboris

cf. to Judge Holden, "If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay." p. 307 cf. Heraclitus fragmenta: "War is both father and king of all; some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free." (53) "It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife." (80) From Zarathustra: I tell you: one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. (Prologue, 5) I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance. (I.7) vs. the theme of dancing and the judge as a skilled dancer. From GM: Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches — and in punishment there is so much that is festive! (2.VI) [In this one the link to BM is especially appreciable.] That every will must consider every other will its equal [ie. Kant's categorical imperative] — would be a p...

(from last 50 pages, excerpt copied from some other blog) One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of w...

Melville had begun to suspect that violence and death (as opposed, say, to liberty and justice) defined American history. That is why the bloody business of whaling, and not something more benign like the spread of railroads or the "annex" of new territories (which were, of course, only relatively benign), stands as his metaphor for American capitalist and imperial aspirations. (Philips 8)

Learning from Art: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine Determinism by Dennis Sansom [after examples of Voltaire's Candide critiquing Leibniz's optimism, Huxley's Brave New World critiquing Marxism] The artist’s imagination, especially in literature, pictures what can happen. Aristotle may be right in saying that art imposes an ideational form upon matter, but art can also indicate whether an ideational form should be imposed upon matter. In keeping with Aristotle’s terminology, the actuality of the idea may pervert or hinder the potentiality of the matter. Some ideas do not fulfill the potentiality of the human experience and they should be rejected, though they are logical, systematic, and clear. Some philosophical ideas cannot stand the test of the imagination. How does the artistic imagination test an idea? The artistic imagination is not just a fanciful thought experiment or a mirror of experience. In the Critique of Judgement Kant argued that artis...