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Showing posts from January, 2020

Twin Oaks in January

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Twin Oaks in January. About 4PM Wednesday, I knocked off for the day.  Most of the afternoon was spent chainsawing some branches and debris from a recent squall line that came through here.  Much of January has been unusually warm.  Temperatures in the 60's even during a couple of nights.  And a lot of rain. Wednesday was the end of our first big cold snap of 2020.  Temperatures plummeted into the lower 20's for a few nights and never got out of the 30's a couple of days.  The wind was also relentlessly windy, two days and nights of 20 MPH gusts.  My heat pump can't cut that.  I used emergency heat and some propane.   So, I cleaned up most of the debris from all that and knocked off about four.  It was so quiet here.  I could hear a lite amount of traffic on the state highway two miles away.  The sound of I-75 was mute.  No vehicle passed my house.  There was a dog barking way off somewhere.  Then a cow bellowed.  There was a barn owl a mile or so to the south

Exploring Nietzsche's Psychology: Revaluation, Becoming, and Style

Note: This is the final part of this series.  You can read Part One here . “ Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it.  (Daybreak 108) Nietzsche intentionally does not prescribe any specific methods or techniques for discovering or mastering the multiplicity of drives and affects.  This may seem as though he has not thought things through very well.  There is little in the way of practical advice in his psychology.  But Nietzsche’s truth claim is merely to understand the mechanics of the multiplicity in all its many facets.  How to master the mechanics and be a well-ordered soul is not specifically told because it can’t be.  Unlike virtually any other “wise” teacher you will encounter, Nietzsche understands that the multiplicity is almost infinitely varied and will manifest diffe

Exploring Nietzsche’s Psychology: Drives and Affects

Note: This is Part Two of a series.  You can read Part One here . One fundamental problem with Nietzsche’s psychology is that while “higher” persons must discover and master their multiplicity of drives Nietzsche tells us in Daybreak (1881):  “However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being.  He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flow, their play and counterplay among one another…”  (D 119) How are we to master something we can’t ever fully know?  Well, first of all, many drives do appear in consciousness, especially the most dominant ones which motivate our behavior.  Katsafanas notes: “Drives are initially unconscious, but can be brought to consciousness – all that's required is pressing the drive into a conceptual structure.  But there's no guarantee that the conceptualized expression will be an adequate or accurate express

A Relic of a Phone

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Possibly the world's oldest continuously operating phone.  62 years (so far) of reliable service. My parents have the same phone on their kitchen wall that was installed when they built their house in 1957.  It is the same phone that was there when I was born in 1959.  Growing up, it was the only phone in our house until dad started working for the power company in the 70's.  Then he had another phone installed in my parents' bedroom so that he could take calls into work in the middle of the night when folk's power went out. Both are rotary phones, which don't exist except as novelties anymore.  You can't navigate today's corporate phone jungles with them.  You can't "press 1 now."  You can dial 1 but that doesn't do anything anymore.  The receiver still works crystal clear, so you can "say 1 now" if asked to.  Otherwise you are stuck. The old kitchen wall phone makes and receives what used to be called "ordinary&

Exploring Nietzsche's Psychology: I am "We," the Nature of Drives

Psychology dates back at least to ancient Egypt and Greece.  As a proper discipline of study it remained under the umbrella of philosophy until 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first institution devoted exclusively to psychological research.  The new field of science quickly became all the rage in Europe.  Contrasting schools of psychology emerged in 1880’s with Sigmund Freud undertaking his pioneering research beginning in the 1890’s.  Friedrich Nietzsche began dabbling in psychology as early as the late-1860’s.  As my Nietzsche blog attests, there are many avenues to Nietzsche’s philosophy.  One of them is definitely psychological in nature.  Psychology is, in fact, fundamental to Nietzsche’s philosophy.  You cannot understand Nietzsche without understanding his perspectives on this subject.  I am beginning 2020 with a series of posts devoted to Nietzsche’s view of human psychology, which, I believe, is a useful tool in self-understanding and continues to be relevant today. In