Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In grappling with Nietzsche's ideas, Kaufmann appreciates fully his experimental style. He writes: The elusive quality of this style, which is so characteristic of Nietzsche's way of thinking and writing, might be called monadologic to crystallize the tendency of each aphorism to be self-sufficient while yet throwing light on almost every other aphorism. We are confronted with a "pluralistic universe" in which each aphorism is itself a microcosm. Almost as often as not, a single passage is equally relevant to ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, theory of value, psychology, and perhaps half a dozen other fields. Despite Kaufmann's appreciation of this "pluralistic" style, he wants to piece together Nietzsche's aphorisms and show his thinking is coherent and systematic. This program goes against not only his style but also Nietzsche's criticism of philosophic systems as a way of stopping thought. Kaufmann sees Nietzsche's perspectivis...

. . . I have been impressed by the figure of Old Emerson who stands in the novel for the views of the American Transcendentalist, the Sage of Concord. Old Emerson is given to philosophizing, a trait at least potentially irritating if his words are not suffused with such human warmth. He speaks for direct experience, as opposed to reliance on authority and tradition, and for that most direct of experiences, sexual passion. A passage from Ralph Waldo's essay "Nature" (1836) is so pertinent to the Sacred Lake episode, when the three men stripped to play in a natural pool in the woods, that I wonder if Forster had the Sage's words before him as he wrote. The passage is famous. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still trul...

Last night I made another stab at reducing the pile of unread magazines and journals, and read TLS July 11 2008. from Peter Brook's review of Michael Murphy's Proust and America : But Murphy subtly and convincingly argues that Proust's sense of the "metaphorics of retrospection" has an Emersonian cast: the "looping-the-loop" by which we return to our earlier selves, and which opens on to Marcel's eventual discovery that the writer's task is that of translator--of life, of nature--recalls Emerson's sense of nature as a place of signsm a place engaged in a perpetual writing. Proustian metaphor espouses the famous Emersonian credo that words are signs of natural facts, and natural facts are signs of spiritual facts. * If "love" in Proust is self-torturingm riven with jealousy, doubt and a masochistic need to witness the beloved's infidelity, this is part and parcel of the detective work that characterizes his novel, as it does Poe...

frm Barbara J. King's review of Gregory Radick's The Simian Tongue: The long debate about animal language , and Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature : In his zoo work, [Richard] Garner invented what we would today call the primate playback experiment. . . . This re-emergence [of the playback technique] is mainly due to the work of the British ornithologist-turned-primatologist Peter Marler. . . . The Amboseli vervets made scientic history. When the vervets heard a played-back call originally uttered in the presence of an eagle, they fled into the bushes. For leopard and snake calls, they responded in distinct but similarly adaptive ways. Seufarth, Cheney and Marler proved that the calls contained not just high-arousal cues but specific information about the environment. * "Linguists," [Pinker] writes, "call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them 'conceptual semantics'. Conceptual semantics--...