Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM, Friedrich Nietzsche and Will Kymlicka

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these philosophers

display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers


7 ideas

21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 1. Aesthetics
Aesthetics can be more basic than morality, in our pleasure in certain patterns of experience [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Some of the aesthetic valuations are more fundamental than the moral ones e.g. the pleasure in what is ordered, surveyable, limited, in repetition. The logical, arithmetical and geometrical good feelings form the ground floor of aesthetic valuations.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 35[02])
     A reaction: Nietzsche's originality is so striking because his novel suggestions are always plausible. Lots of modern philosophers (especially, I fear, in the continental tradition) throw out startling ideas which then fail on closer inspection.
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 2. Aesthetic Attitude
Experiencing a thing as beautiful is to experience it wrongly [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: To experience a thing as beautiful necessarily means experiencing it wrongly.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 10[167])
     A reaction: So much for 'beauty is truth' (Keats). I suppose I agree, for example, about a face. If you don't experience the beauty of a good melody, there is nothing else left to experience - no mundane truth that needs reporting.
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 3. Taste
Why are the strong tastes of other people so contagious? [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Why are likes and dislikes so contagious that one can scarcely live in proximity to a person of strong sensibilities without being filled like a vessel with pros and cons?
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human [1878], 371)
     A reaction: I was on the receiving end of this when young, and I think it influenced me to propound stronger views about things than I could ever justify, since my natural disposition is to be cautious about all views. Nice question. Why?
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 4. Beauty
Beauty in art is the imitation of happiness [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: By beauty in art one always understands imitation of happiness.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 433)
     A reaction: I'm not sure how one goes about imitating happiness. One can replicate things that make us happy, like a nice landscape. But some beauty in art is also novel, and produces a new sort of happiness. Kandinsky.
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 5. Natural Beauty
The beautiful never stands alone; it derives from man's pleasure in man [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Anyone who tried to divorce the beautiful from man's pleasure in man would at once feel the ground give way beneath him. The 'beautiful in itself' is not even a concept, merely a phrase.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols [1889], 8.19)
     A reaction: I love the insult 'not even a concept'! It's like Pauli's 'not even wrong'!
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 6. The Sublime
People who miss beauty seek the sublime, where even the ugly shows its 'beauty' [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Whoever does to achieve the beautiful seeks the wildly sublime, because there even the ugly can show its 'beauty'. Likewise we seek the wildly sublime morality.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[049])
     A reaction: Is the 'we' here Nietzsche, or the herd? The former, I guess, since some the values he likes seem rather ugly to me. He is a fan of war, for example. I'm guessing that massive destruction is sublime but ugly.
The sublimity of nature which dwarfs us was a human creation [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: This beauty and sublimity of nature, before which every human being seems small, was first imposed on nature by us.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[38])
     A reaction: I was struck when I was 10 with how indifferent to a landscape I was, when my mother told me it was 'beautiful'. Five years later I saw it differently. I assume nature is not intrinsically sublime. Dwarfed by our own concept is a bit odd.