external monologue

reflections on nietzsche

i snagged this out of an email i wrote to a friend who was helping me proofread my paper.

"you're right about those existentialists. i decided last night that i
much prefer existentialist literature to philosophy - camus vs. sartre,
percy vs. nietzsche, etc etc. characters who actually live
existentially are much more convincing than crabby old philosophers who
just wish they did."

it think this pretty well sums up my feelings about reading just about everything nietzsche wrote, during the past 3 months. i think its really due to the fact that existentialism is flawed as a system because it always looks for "salvation" from within - the inconsistent and ever-disappointing self. however, characters in novels can be made to find their satisfaction within, or at least be at peace with themselves at the close of the story. in real life, we have to keep on living, and battling - something that nietzsche did poorly with in his own life. the impression i get of his later years are one sustained anxiety attack. ugh...

ascii star wars

i thought this was quite funny: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

Nietzsche on Tragedy

well, the paper is finally done. you may have noticed the lack of blogging recently and it's largely due to the time i've been putting into the paper. i hadn't really intended to let it take over the way that it did, but i got a bit bogged down in the research side of things. that was always my problem in college - too much time researching, too little writing. but, i feel good about this one. it didn't come out exactly as i wanted - i was hoping to include a biblical critique of nietzsche's view of tragedy, but it fell by the wayside. as it is, the paper was already 3 days late. :/

if for some reason you feel compelled to read it, it's here.

loapher.com

finally made a little progress on the website today, and the cool thing was that i got to count it as "work." i'm supposed to be learning PHP here at the office for an upcoming project. my site was just moved to a linux box running PHP so its a perfect testing ground for practicing php.

concessions

thursday night is "house dinner" at our apartment. my four roommates and i always make a point of being home by 7ish and gathering around the table for an intentional meal together. years ago, when we started this, it all seemed a bit contrived, but of late, i think we've all come to rely upon it as needed quality time together. the best ones are when no one has any plans after dinner and we all retire to the porch to finish off the wine, and partake of some fresh air. i think this past week's was one of our best ever. which brings me to the point of this entry - concessions.

we spent a good couple of hours discussing relationships. something we all tend to do after a long week and a few glasses of wine. (i won't get into details, i'll just say there's plenty of confusion under one roof.) the topic this week was how and why people make concessions, or compromises, in relationships, and whether that's a good thing. brent and i tend to think that making concessions are some sort of falsification of the self and that if you make changes specifically to please your "special someone" then you're just being fake. whereas my other roommates, isaac and chris, tend to feel that making concessions is the stuff of good relationships. that is, when you love someone, you give up things that are important to you for the "greater cause" of the relationship.

by the end of the evening, i must admit, i was beginning to change my own tune, and seeing the importance of making "concessions" (perhaps not the best term). i can't tell you how many times i've heard my married friends say something to the effect of "marriage is all about compromise." and looking back over my own relational attempts i can see where i've often gotten off-track due to my own (or others) unwillingness to compromise. so, as always, i suppose there's a balance to be struck. somewhere between a total loss of identity into someone else, as Will Leitch fears, and holding out for an exact mirror of oneself.

if you didn't catch the link before, thesimon.com's life as a loser was all about the same thing this week.

easter feaster

john sweet put on the third annual Easter Feaster yesterday afternoon, or Easter Feaster 03, as he likes to call it. all things considered, i believe it was quite a success. we had a turnout of 27, which makes for a tight fit in an 1100 sq/ft apartment, but we did overflow onto the porch. many pictures were taken, but no digitals unfortunately. once they're developed i'll try to get some online.

easter poem

for easter, one of my favorite poems, by one of my favorite poets:

EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

nietzsche paper

i can't remember if i've mentioned this previously, but i've been sitting in on a class this semester up at Covenant College, my alma mater. actually, i'm not just sitting in, i'm taking it for credit, which is sort of what's at issue right now because we have our final paper due on thursday. i'm kind of stuck at this point as to what i want to write on so i thought i'd take a few minutes and brainstorm on my blog.

the idea is to talk about nietzsche's fascination with tragedy, or the tragic vehicle. most of his discussion of tragedy is laid out in his first major work, the birth of tragedy, but the ideas continue throughout the rest of his writings and even seem to undergird his later ideas on eternal recurrence and morality. what i find interesting about his ideas is how closely they seem to parallel a christian approach to the questions of existence. at root for most philosophers is the search for meaning in existence and this is no different for Nietzsche. ultimately he determines that one's reality, one's ethic, flows from one's will to power, and this theme informs all areas of his thinking. however, early on, before he comes to this belief, in BT, he seems more interested in dealing with the suffering of life in an authentic manner. that is, attempting to mollify the anguish of life by striking a balance between an Apollonian ignorance of the noumenal and a Dionysian dismissal of the phenomenal. (if that sentence made no sense to you that's okay. i'm not sure it makes sense to me, but i just need to flesh out my thoughts...)

anyhow, what i want to write about is the development of thought from Nietzsche in BT to Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos to my own biblically informed response to suffering. which, in turn, should show the circular nature of the whole discussion and the manner in which both Nietzsche's and Percy's (and my own) ideas about suffering and deliverance are informed necessarily by the Holy Spirit. for Nietzsche, and I think for Percy, this is completely unintentional. what we covenant grads would call a common grace insight. whereas for me, it is completely intentional and an attempt to flesh out ways in which all knowledge is from God, or "all truth is God's truth" as Van Til would say.

i think that last idea is what is most fascinating to me about this whole Nietzschian (sp?) study. the fact that though he can be so wrong about so many things, about most of his final conclusions, he can be so right about his starting points. his insights about human nature and human suffering are more accurate, more disarming, than much of what i've read coming out of the Christian camp. and yet, sadly, in his refusal to allow for a "weak" savior, his conclusions feel absolutely contrived.

joel

my younger, no longer little, brother joel came for a visit this weekend. he was up trying out for the covenant college soccer team. we spent some time walking around downtown, visited john sweet's bakery (niedlov's breadworks), and went to the COPC multi-wedding shower on friday night.

it was great to have him up here. after having spent 3+ years with my other brother tim here in chattanooga, i'm realizing how important these years are for establishing long term relationships. i pitched joel on moving up here for at least the summer, and he seemed interested. i suppose its out of my hands at this point.

pictures to follow...

hooked on polyphonics

(sorry for the long delay in recent bloggery. apparently there were some updates being done on the server where i'm hosted. seems everything is now in working order, which is a good thing because i've been achin' for an update.)

so....

if you were in chattanooga on monday night and you weren't at the UTC Twenty-Frist Annual C. S. Lewis Lecture, then, well, you missed out. big time. the speaker was Roger W. Lundin, an english prof from wheaton college up in chicago. the title of his lecture was 'Nimble Believing': Modern Literature and the Conflict of Interpretations, and his ideas dealt with a number of issues i've been thinking about a great deal lately. at root, the thrust of his lecture dealt with what has been called "the problem of many authorities," and particularly as it has to do with the christian tradition. this is originally seen in people like Martin Luther who felt there were contradictions between the various authorities of scripture, reason, and tradition. this led ML to a "theory of contraction" by which he eliminated the latter two in favor of scripture alone (sola scritura). however, this didn't ultimately solve the problem. as those of us in the reformed tradition have seen, there is no lack of competing authorities even within our small slice of the christian ideological pie. which leaves us in a bit of jam. with all these apparently contradictory ideas floating around about various interpretations of the bible one begins to wonder if a knowledge of "real" truth is even possible. since thinking about this can get pretty depressing, the response has typically been for individuals to take hold of one idea, and unrelentingly apply it to every situation and dilemma, avoiding exceptions, and denying complexity.

Lundin calls this "monological" thinking. that is, seeing the world as strict black and white, true and false, distinctions, with no place for paradox. an example he gives of this type of thinking in church history is the doctrine of docetism which attempted to deny Christ's humanity. those monological thinkers, unable to handle the tension of Christ being both God and Man, saw his humanity as mere illusion and his divinity as reality. black and white. easy.

but as we know, neither christianity nor christ are easy to understand. christ's message of course is simple, but his person, is incomprehensibly (sp?) complex. as much as we'd like to break these doctrines down into such simple categories, its just not that easy. Christ is God. Christ is Man. a seeming paradox, and yet a necessity in order to affirm the truths of the scriptures. but i'm getting sidetracked here...

Lundin's response to this sort of monological thinking is what he calls the polyphonic approach, based on the musical idea of polyphony. He asserts that though truth, in reality, is unified, it is approached bia a plurality of consciousnesses. in other words, multiple voices commenting on "unified truth" need not be contradictory by nature, but that instead, perhaps we get at truth by way of 2 or more voices. that is, our understanding of what is true is informed by the combination of our perspectives, not the contradiction of them. now, i know this sounds dangerously close to perspectivalism but i think its slightly different. the truth is that we are broken, fallen people, and we are unable to see the world as it absolutely is. this doesn't mean that we can't understand the doctrines of the scriptures necessary for faith, but it does mean that, due to our fallen natures, we misunderstand and twist even the book of truth that God has given us. praise God for the work of the Holy Spirit, in working in us and graciously showing us our need for a saviour, but we would be foolish to think that the Spirit's work immediately and economically removes our fallen proclivities. no, instead we fight the old man, day by day, until the day we see the Lord in glory. with this in mind, who are we to claim a perfect and irrefutable understanding of the scriptures that have been argued over by men of great learning since time immemorial.

hmm... i'm beginning to worry myself a bit here. i guess the gist of what i want to say is that i was quite impressed with Lundin's willingness to face the tensions, the apparent paradoxes of Christianity, fearlessly. i'm fed up with people trying in vain to diffuse the radical and disconcerting truths of this faith that we love. and i see Lundin's response as an honest and open approach to grasping these mind-blowing realities.

(i got pretty excited about all this on monday and shot off an email to the man himself. his reply is here if you want to read it.)

please comment...

house hunting

the house hunting has intensified significantly over the past few days. on sunday afternoon i took an afternoon walking tour of some of the up-and-coming downtown properties. most (all) of these are out of my price range, and some are only for rent, but it was an informative tour nonetheless.

the tour was put on by the Chattanooga Downtown Partnership and i'm not exactly clear on how all of the developers got involved. i presume that they each had to fork over a good bit of money for the CDP to market and show their properties. nevertheless, its pretty exciting to see how things are moving downtown. the first place we (bob demarco and me) went to was the new Loveman Apartments on market street, and after seeing these places, everything else felt kind of small potatos.
check out the photos... they certainly have a nice private patio and a good view of downtown.

that said, bob and i both decided that we couldn't, in good conscience, actually live in a such an ostentatious abode. by far, my favorite of the afternoon were the new bread factory lofts. these were much more affordable, and more creative in their use of space
and layout in my (slightly architecturally informed) opinion.

this morning, my roommate isaac and i met with a representative from the holmes corporation to talk about new development going on in the MLK/McCallie neighborhoods. he and i had both gotten pretty excited about some of the property here and the location. unfortunately our meeting was a bit disappointing - seems most of the potential property has been bought up by holmes already, precluding us from finding a good fixer-upper. but we press on.

oh, we also looked at the house that my carpenter friends bob and todd have been working on. talk about your fixer-uppers...

phoenix

okay... sorry for another geekentry, but this stuff's actually kinda cool. i've made yet another shift in browser allegiance. or perhaps i'm just going further down the rabbit hole. i've moved from mozilla to phoenix, and even though it's only in a 0.5 beta stage, i think this is the way to go. now its a standalone application - no longer bundled to mozilla mail, or the rest of that package, and seems much faster and more agile. the extensions and themes are almost too easy. find out more at the mozilla road map.

good news from the (browser) war front

nongeek readers may wish to skip this entry...

i've recently converted from running the micro$oft IE 6 browser on my computer at work to the new mozilla 1.3 and have quickly become a proponent of open-source browser development. yesterday, april fools day, this story was linked from mozillazine. if you get the joke, its pretty funny. :P

you might check out phoenix too, if you're interested.

treason

on the way into work this morning i was listening to NPR's Morning Edition. this is part of my morning routine, and usually pretty enjoyable. i must admit that at times in the past i have been frustrated by the not-so-subtle leftist overtones that public radio seems to have, but generally it is made up for by the quality of progamming and access to stories i'd not hear elsewhere. not to mention that i think the leftist slant of public radio is more than made up for by the glut of nauseating conservative talk show hosts (limbaugh, hannity, o'reilly, bortz, etc, etc.).

however, this morning they went over the line. there was story called 'Baghdad' about various Americans who have traveled to Baghdad to serve as human shields during the campaign on Iraq. The story, as per usual, was presented in a very sympathetic light to the cause the "shields" are working towards: "They are attempting to stop the U.S.-led war against Iraq, and protect infrastructure they say serves only civilian purposes." That statement by itself sounds pretty innocuous, and correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't these people committing treason? Would this not be considered giving the Iraqi enemy "aid"? And its not so much that i'm even shocked that this is going on as much as the fact that NPR was so encouraging to these people. What exactly do they want to happen here? although i'm not the most conservative tool in the shed, the liberal agenda sometimes baffles me. i often get the sense that more than anything else they'd like to see us lose the war merely on principle. that is, regardless of how much pain and suffering Saddam Hussein may be inflicting on these people, the best conclusion to this conflict would be the Bush Administration being made fools of. Yeesh.

and as far as the war is concerned, i still don't know if i think it was the best move, but, come on, now that we're over there we sure as hell better support our troops, not the defectors! i don't know... listen to the story, tell me what you think.