Bericht
door Barl » 03 mar 2019 09:46
Beste Peter,
Dat was een fijne post, dank je wel. Ik weet nog dat m'n moeder Russels boek had gekocht en ik het checkte door het hoofdstukje over Nietzsche te lezen. M'n oordeel was niet positief: hij vergelijkt Nietzsche in feite met Boeddha en concludeert dat hij Boeddha prettiger vindt... Heb er verder niet veel uit gelezen, maar vond het hoofstukje over Schopenhauer erg amusant: ik wist dat toen nog niet van obit anus, abit onus. Strauss schrijft overigens wel een enigszins amusant stukje over filosofie en wetenschap:
"In the seventeenth century, a new philosophy and a new science began to emerge. They made the same claims as all earlier philosophy and science had done, but the result of this seventeenth century revolution produced something which had never existed before—the emergence of Science with a capital 'S'. Originally the attempt had been to replace traditional philosophy and science by a new philosophy and a new science; but in the course of a few generations it appeared that only a part of the new philosophy and science was successful and, indeed, amazingly successful. No one could question these development, e.g. Newton. But only a part of the new science or philosophy was successful, and then the great distinction between philosophy and science, which we are all familiar with, came into being. Science is the successful part of modern philosophy or science, and philosophy is the unsuccessful part—the rump. Science is therefore higher in dignity than philosophy. The consequence, which you know, is the depreciation of all knowledge which is not scientific in this peculiar sense. Science becomes the authority for philosophy in a way perfectly comparable to the way in which theology was the authority for philosophy in the middle ages. Science is the perfection of man's natural understanding of the world. But then, certain things took place in the nineteenth century, e.g., the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and its use in physics, which made it clear that science cannot be described adequately as the perfection of man's natural understanding of the world, but rather as a radical modification of man's natural understanding of the world. In other words, science is based on certain fundamental hypotheses which, being hypotheses, are not absolutely necessary and which always remain hypothetical. The consequence was again drawn most clearly by Nietzsche: science is only one interpretation of the world among many. It has certain advantages, but that of course does not give it any ultimately superior cognitive status. The last consequence stated by some men in our age is as you know: modern science is in no way superior to Greek science, as little as modern poetry is superior to Greek poetry. In other words, even science with its enormous prestige—a prestige higher than any other power in the modern world—is also a kind of giant with feet of clay, if you consider its foundations. As a consequence of this chain of scientific development the notion of a rational morality, the heritage of Greek philosophy, has, to repeat myself, lost its standing completely; all choices are, it is argued, ultimately non-rational or irrational." (Strauss, "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis of Western Civilization".)
Je observering mbt. de Bijbel (ho Biblos, "het Boek") is spot-on:
"At one point (in Antioch), the transmission [of Aristotle] depended on the survival of a single man who had two students, each of whom had two students; but one individual from each of these two pairs devoted himself to religious affairs, so that again there were only two left who taught philosophy. Then, Muslim students and teachers, including Alfarabi himself, were able to read Aristotle's logical works and go as far as they could. The concealment is thus connected with religion (Christianity). What had earlier happened as a result of natural cataclysms and been done unconsciously through myth now happened through religion by design and consciously. Philosophy survived but had to go underground because of a human or divine cataclysm." (Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, "Religion and the Cyclical View of History".)
Je observering mbt. de drukpers vind ik interessant; ik heb er niet zo één-twee-drie iets op te zeggen.
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Petra, ook jij bedankt. Je observering mbt. originaliteit lijkt me erg te kloppen.
Ik heb momenteel even genoeg inspiratie van dit forum gehad en ben weer even in mezelf gekeerd. Om een tipje van de sluier op te lichten:
Nature is history: the only nature that remains is the eternal flux itself. [...]
To make myself clearer: the only absolute nature that remains is History/the eternal flux/the totality of phenomena etc. What remains of natures, plural, is relative natures, for instance those of the birds and of their ancestors, the dinosaurs. Besides the differences between the birds and the dinosaurs, there are of course differences between the various species of birds, and even within a single species. [...]
That nature is history means there is no first nature, only second (third, fourth, etc.)—and "zeroth" (the totality/nothingness/God etc.)...
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Een eerste natuur zou bv. die van Adam en Eva zijn: kant en klaar geschapen uit het Niets, niet geëvolueerd.
"What Strauss now provides at last renders the postponed verdict in the trial of paragraph 26 and renders it in Nietzsche's favor. For the one charge left open at the end of the series of charges in paragraph 26 was 'that for Nietzsche there cannot be a natural or rational morality because he denies that there is a nature of man'. The charge is false. Nietzsche does not deny that there is a nature of man, though of course he denies that it is timeless or even that it is now unalterable: the very threat to human nature in one of its [two] forms requires that Nietzsche act." (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, "Solving the Highest, the Most Difficult Problem".)
