"the romntic movement in art, literature, and in politics is bound up with...judging men not as members of a community, but as aesthetically delightful objects of contemplation. tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars. the typical romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leaps with which the tiger annihilates the sheep. he exhorts men to imagine themselves as tigers and when he succeeds the results are not wholly pleasant."
"the result, in thought as in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism, operating at first as a wholesome liberation form spiritual slavery, but advancing steadily towards a personal isolation inimical to social sanity."
bertrand russell from " a history of western philosophy"
it's bertie's 139th birthday and evolutionary biologists as well as physisits say philosophy is irrelevant because it hasn't kept up with scientific advances that are pidgeon-holing us all with socio-biology...we may be hard-wired to be much of what we are...all that guanine and thymine and adenine and cytosine telling us we have to love the color red or loathe broccoli...but i can still admire a trenchant critique of nietzsche because, "...the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die."....hitler was a romantic and so are all the other members of social elites who find the purpose of "common" folk to serve unquestioningly...lots of that going on in the late empire as the doyens and doges manipulate us with bread, circuses ( what else could you call the crypto-fascist fox network or congress?), and fear into seeing their interests as ours...it's an old template...church and state as uneasy bedfellows thrown together from fear of the mob and puzzling out new permutations of the same old story...situational ethics ( taken to dizzying heights by john dewey's pragmatic naturalism..woody wilson loved his ass) and subjectivist thinking constantly leading the powers that be down dead ends that have to be explained by treachery or acts of god...and people just keep taking the bait...bertie and i were contemporaries in time for a bit, and he is one of a number of people who tried to demonstrate to me that there are rational alternatives to the institutional structures we live within...odd how unpopular they were and are with elites...but the epicuruses and siegfried sassoons and g e moores and salman rushdies and george orwells and yevgeny zamyatins and issac babels and w s sebalds and bertrand russells are still out there being read...politicians and theologians hate free will.
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