Author: mutemaler (---.dpool.celox.de)
Date: 04-25-06 18:54
"Sunny day mutemaler. Almost."
I read this last (missed it the first time through), and just started laughing and laughing. Yes, you could say that. If I took it correctly, that is. Clouds pass. No big deal.
***
Off topic a bit (not too much though), and from a completely different source (Hansen). The subject line made me think of it so I dug it up. And the abyss from a different perspective to boot.
"A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangqi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any clif as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangqi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness --free flight -- not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangqi's reaction is not 'Oh no!' but 'Whee!".
[this is not to say that the relative is arbitrary by the way, think of the chokes. a useful phrase, together with the scatter]
"Do you think the ultimate material Building Block or the ultimate other-worldly Cement is as hell bent to be found?"
No, just bad myths (as opposed to good myths).
Whee!
mutemaler
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