inquery

Redirect: codydjango.com

I have a lot going on in my life right now.  Either that, or not much of anything.  Sometimes it’s hard to say.

Bottom line: I don’t ever update my tumblr… so goodbye.  I might start up again once I have a reason.

A reason?  A reason:

I’ll be booking wednesday nights at the green room in the new year.  It’s gonna be a sophisticated, classy night.  More of a vernissage than a traditional show.  Tight schedule, on time, good sound and cheap drinks, and instead of promoting, we’ll be archiving.  Working title is “The Rendez-Vous”.

Tumblr might be a good instrument for documentation.   The entries for the show could be made here, then reposted to facebook.  I could also pull the entries from the api to the rendez-vous website.

Either way, it’d be under another name.  As soon as I pull my old posts from here, I’m done.

A Thousand Plateaus: Arborescence and Rhizomes

The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature.  The law of reflection: one becomes two. This is the “most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought”.

Art imitates nature with a civilzation, culture, society — a second nature.  But Nature itself is not one-without-two; nature is not unchanging.  There is a dynamism of and in nature, and no reflectivity is necessary for it’s growth which is a growth outwards, rather than up.  Deleuze uses the examples of taproots, rhizomes, and an equation: (n-1).

Nature is “neither reducible to the the One or the multiple.”  It is not composed of units.  Units are the basis of analysis, which is always removed from nature - especially when oriented back towards nature.  Nature is composed “of dimensions, or rather directions in motion”.

“It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and overspills.”

“It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1).”

“When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis.”

Towards a Genealogy of Morals [Nietzsche]

In Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 260, Nietzsche makes the claim that there are two basic types of traits which regularly reoccur in combination, linked to one another: master moralities and slave moralities.  While initially speaking historically about culture, Nietzsche also claims that these traits are found within individuals.

“In all higher and more complex cultures, there are also apparent attempts to mediate between the two moralities, and even more often a confusion of the two and a mutual misunderstanding, indeed sometimes even their violent juxtaposition—even in the same person, within one single breast.”[1]

The ‘master moralities’ are the  “proud exalted states of soul that are thought to distinguish and define the hierarchy.”[2]  Societal morals emerge from the power of individuals, for “the noble person feels himself as determining value” and “everything that he knows of himself he reveres.”[3]  Slave morality is treated with slightly less reverence, and Nietzsche first qualifies that a slave morality is the morality of a slave – someone who experiences oppression at the expense of another; someone for whom the master morality, as the presence of the other, is completely unattainable, and from whom his own stature is absolutely diminished.  It therefore only seems natural, like an animal born into captivity, that the slave, in the creation of his own morality, will carry a different standard of valuation.  The slave cannot measure values by the standards of his master, for it is by the masters valuation that he is a slave.  A different form for justifying a slave’s life, and for affirming a slave’s place in the human condition is necessary.

Nietzsche suggests that the chronically oppressed “probably express a pessimistic suspicion about the whole human condition, and might even “condemn the human being along with his condition.”  Further, they are “sceptical and distrustful… keenly distrustful of everything that the powerful revere as ‘good’” and would like to convince themselves that even the happiness of the masters is not genuine.[4]  For the slave, it is the qualities of life that relieve chronic which are affirmed and valued: pity, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness.  It is perhaps worthwhile to note that relief is a temporalizing attribute.  Nietzsche concludes “Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility” and that “it is upon this hearth that the famous opposition ‘good’ and ‘evil’ originates.”[5]

In Genealogy of Morals - the subsequent work to Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche takes up this theme for the basis of three essays.  To be more precise, the essays explain how ‘noble’ conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are construed as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by a new ‘priestly nature’ of man.[6]  In essay one, Nietzsche posits that a slave morality emerges from a slave class in order to devalue their masters.  Essay two explains how the slave morality is eventually brought against the slaves themselves, with a type of internalization that resolves with ‘bad conscious’ and ‘guilt’.[7]  The third essay concerns the ascetic values of Christianity and how they results in a devaluing of human nature.

It is by way of historical investigation that Nietzsche reveals and develops his ideas, establishing slave morality as the origin for the Christian climate of Europe.  From the origin, Nietzsche provides a historical ‘tracing’ of how a morality transforms from an instrument of the slave class, to a belief, to the ‘transcendent’ religious doctrine that is found in the institutionalizing church.  The ‘tracing’ is obviously not to be taken as a historical truth; history is always degrees of interpretation and selection.  It is telling that the book is subtitled “a polemic” - one is well cautioned that Nietzsche will not be playing by consensus in his historical analysis.

While one may wish to ignore this as a work of historical speculation, I believe that it’s importance rests not with historical investigation, but with the philosophy which makes use of historical description to render ways of thinking about man and his nature.   It is particularly telling that Nietzsche stated in preface that it is not his concern to engage in “hypothesis-mongering” - what’s at stake is the value of morality.[8]



SIGNIFICANCE OF A GENEALOGICAL FRAMEWORK

The ‘Genealogical framework’ is a way for Nietzsche to shift focus from the foreground of historical analysis to the background; to analyse societal currents and the conditions which give rise to moral significance.[9]  By drawing on history for significance, Nietzsche is able to present a much more detailed explication of his ideas and their importance.  Along the way, he challenges us to read history from the margins,

The work of Genealogy of Morals is decidedly non-metaphysical, and instead, attention is directed to naturalism – man is a natural being, found in an environment, conditioned by his environment,.  Further, Man develops “second natures” - over time, as perspectives are handed down generation by generation, they become internalized.  Nietzsche seems to urge his readers to understand that the standards and perspectives that are found within their fields of intellection are not universal, but have been shaped historically.  It is by way of this intuitive approach that we arrive at a more developed understanding of the certain commitments that Nietzsche himself holds to (biology, health, perspectivism, and ultimately will-to-power) while rejecting doctrines and ideology in general.

There are many ways to read Nietzsche (the skeptical, pragmatic, and existential bodies all have their interpretation), but I think, as an almost purely descriptive ‘historical genealogy’ , Genealogy of Morals, in particular, is a type of work that benefits from a phenomenological reading, for it seems to inquire into history from the perspective of subjectivity – the actions of individuals as found within a society, within conflict, and within history.

I think it’s interesting that Nietzsche prefaces Genealogy of Morals, which, among other things, reads as a critique of religious doctrine, with a quote from Matthew 6:21 (“Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.”)  Nietzsche develops this quote to reveal a truth of human nature: man cares singularly about “bringing something home.”[10]  It is from this truth – a natural truth – that we can understand that men are driven to action when they are unable to “bring something home.”  In the case of the slaves, it is their ressentiment from which the slave morality is birthed.

Further, I find an interesting play in the passage.  “Men of knowledge” do not care to analyse the “so-called ‘experiences’.”  Man is too busy, to concerned with his own life, and when he does shift focus to the reflective, is continually met with the ‘eternal’ question of “who we are.”  Acknowledging the limitations of our intuitive perceptual experiences[11], and acknowledging the human being as a being without Knowledge with respect to himself, and futher, acknowledging the human drive to “bring something home” Nietzsche, conversely, engages with a Genealogy, in order to clarify an understanding of “how we come to be.”

Nietzsche seems to be saying that there is a genealogy at work in our present – we are what we have come to be.  This truth cannot be explained by our ‘science’ or any departmentalized, categorical, positivistic knowledge.  Further, it seems a bastardization to accept our present (in this case, morality, as it is found as Christian morality in the society in which Nietzsche lives) as absolute Truth.  Through an analysis of historical developments, genealogy seems to be about one thing: bringing historical experience home.

I wonder if there isn’t some correlation between Nietzsches critique of doctrine and his apparent commitment to the importance of experience: perhaps doctrine impedes a receptiveness to experience, which seems to be the only real value for the curious.

Genealogy enables Nietzsche to affirm his commitment to perspectivism while rendering a new historical approach to value; values emerge out of struggle and conflict - not from a transcendental realm.  Philosophically, it’s a response to Kant; culturally, it’s a slight against God.


IMPLICIT STANDARDS OF VALUATION

A typical criticism against Nietzsche is that one can’t criticize standards without imposing one’s own standards.  Fair enough, for Nietzsche’s genealogical method is not value-neutral.  Value-neutral would imply “objective,” one of the values deriving from Nietzsche’s positivist culture, and one of the values he abhors as a monstrous falsification.  Objectivity pertains to scientific data; not to value.  Instrumentally, beliefs can be pragmatic, such as the ‘objectivity’ of science.  But, in the case of absolute claims on reality, time, truth, the human condition, this, to Nietzsche, and to the doctrine of perspectivism, is blasphemous.  If moral value has been shown to be a phenomena of cultural conflict and not dependent on divine absolutes, it must be resolutely perspectival – relative to the perspective of the culture from which it emerged.  Shared faith and shared beliefs are held by communities of individuals who share the same genealogy.

The genealogical method indeed invokes an implicit standard of valuation.  Nietzsche does not come out and prescribe a new system of values; he does not wish to indulge in ‘systematic thought’.  Instead, I like to think of Nietzsche commitments as ‘meta-ontological’ commitments: natural, intuitive ways which help to discern and create new modes of valuation based on experience.

The implicit standard is an “enhancement of life”, or what Nietzsche later develops as the “will to power”.  Although many have enjoyed construing Nietzsche’s articulation of will to power for political or “immoral” “unethical” purposes, closer detail reveals something nuanced, interesting, and violent; violent for it forces one to recognize one’s natural position.  Nietzsche finds a slave morality life-denying; to acknowledge such a commitment would surely be painful.

I don’t believe that ‘enhancement of life’ as a mode of evaluation should come as a shock: there seems to be certain naturally intuited values that are common to all human beings: health is preferable to illness, safety is preferable to danger, food is preferable to hunger, control is preferable to being controlled, power is preferable to subjugation.

Nietzsche presents the Greeks as exemplars of those who chose to “enhance life”.  Values were determined by the Noble and upheld by the social: valued attributes were fame, reputation, strength, wealth, health, power.  Further, self-affirmation was present in the culture as a whole — they kept their distance to foreigners, the ambassadors of foreign culture.  This had nothing to do with a Christian morality which might equate ‘us’ with ‘good’ and ‘them’ with ‘evil’.  It was purely self-affirmation in sense of cultivating and preserving a strong culture.

“Freedom” was the slavish conception of will.  To be “free” was to no longer be a slave, free to receive one’s proper due.  But Christianity seems to have missed out on a crucial element of Freedom: free action is nothing without value, with the degree of value is the context which gives rise to the individual free action.  It is not enough to cry for “freedom.”  To be free is only to signify that one takes part in one’s own field of intellection – one creates one’s own values out of reverence and affirmation for ones’ self – this does not seem to bode well with ascetic practice.


CONCLUSION

The value of a genealogical framework is that it provides a way to discern value, and modes of valuation as they are found in history, and further, it is a way to explain the present condition, to understand that historical values are still at work.  Genealogy does not participate in the traditional Christian binary standards of moral/immoral valuations, but rather works to provide a mode of analysis grounded in naturalism and perspectivism, both of which are arguably compatible with the skeptic, nihilist, and pragmatic readings of Nietzsche, if one wanted to start that argument.

Genealogy of Morals is an elaboration of thought, not a prescription.  It is not to be taken in the sense that one ought to affirm a master morality over a slave morality (as is often misconstrued by quick readings of the doctrine of will-to-power) but, as an argument against the “faith in opposite values.”[12]

As Walter Kaufman states in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Nietzsche is dealing with the origins of moral phenomena.[13]  It is this unique approach to morals and culture as a whole (as phenomena: with a history, a structure, and a future) which seems to separate Nietzsche from his peers and his society as a whole.  The over-all purpose, from my perspective, seems to be that Nietzsche wishes his readers to reflect on what it means to awaken to new phenomena, to open new perspectives, and “as the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness” to let doctrine perish.[14]


[1]    BGE 260, p 153.
[2]    ibid.
[3]    ibid. p. 154
[4]    ibid, p. 155
[5]    ibid. p. 156
[6]    Genealogy of Morals 1.6, p. 33.
[7]    “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward” ibid, 2.16, p.84
[8]    ibid. preface 5, p. 19
[9]    It brings to mind the German movement of the “Gestalt” psychologists
[10]  Genealogy of Morals, Preface 1, p. 15
[11]  “..count the twelve  trembling bell-stokes of our experience, our life, our being – and alas! miscount them.”  ibid.
[12]  Ibid, p. 11.
[13]  Genealogy of Morals, Editors Introduction 4, p. 10.
[14]  Genealogy of Morals 3.28, p. 163

Temporality and Cogito in Phenomenology of Perception [Merleau-Ponty]

‘Pieds Noirs’ is the name that was given to the non-native French in Algeria during the period in which Algeria was a colony of France.  For 130 years, immigrants became French citizens under French law, and participated in the colonial culture of the time.  Once an end to the colonial war was reached, more than a million Pieds Noirs fled Algeria for France, fearing a backlash from the newly sovereign Algerian nationalists.  The Pieds Noirs were colonial occupiers, but they were also victims to the newly sovereign Algerians, and immigrants to a France which no longer wishes to maintain ties to a colonial history.

Today, the Pieds Noir wish to have their narrative affirmed by France as French citizens, and with it, their cultural identity and minority status.  At the same time, to publicly affirm the victims with the memorial museum is to affirmation of the image of Pied Noir as colonial oppressors.

France is being forced to confront both perspectives in the form of debates over the public museums. Is it possible for French Algerian to be assimilated into a national identity while the historicity of colonialist oppressor is not?  The problem seems to have to do with the nature of subjectively constituted identity vis-a-vis the nature of cultural identity. Politically, it seems impossible to retain a multiplicity of identify while asserting a singular historical narrative.1

Modern societies function as bureaucracies in which individuals are understood by the state by their categorical definition.  If politics is executed by the state by way of public policy, identity also becomes an issue of public policy.

It seems difficult to retain the ‘multiplicity’ of woven historicity in public policy, for one must allocate dollars to particular categorical concerns: do we affirm or deny colonialism?  Do we put money towards a museum that has to do with colonialism?  Do we put more money towards feminism?

It is a prerogative of the modern states to preserve and cultivate new identities for their citizens, both as a way to quell historical contention and to ensure allegiance to the state.  If individuals only identify with being a ‘citizen’ and also a member to a ‘nation-state’, we can imagine that very strong links are in developed between the individual and the state.  It seems expedient, in political terms, to let the old, unwanted identities whither, and hope that they are eventually forgotten.2  This seems to be the case with colonial history. 

“The efforts to empower the forgotten French Algerians, to affirm their presence in France proper and their colonial history, is one that is being met with contention.  Many feel that to bring this history to light is to affirm a colonialist past, which many are willing to forget altogether.”

From the position of Cogito, Merleau-Ponty meets temporality as a relation between time and subjectivity, a property of being present in the world.  History is understood not as an objective, causal narrative, but as an eternity from which we abstract a historicity by way the dialectic of time – time as a structure of consciousness.  “Time analysed provides a time structure”3.

Time as a structure of consciousness renders events as causal in their relation to subjectivity.  It is by our being present that we know time in its intuitive, naive fashion.  Through a phenomenological study of temporality, we reach a time not objective, but as a subjective stance that we take to the world.  Consciousness “deploys or constitutes time.”4  Temporality is the relation between time and subjectivity.

Merleau-Ponty asserts that is it the “action of common sense” which “thematizes or objectifies” the “intuition of time’s permanance.”5  The ‘naive consciousness’ finds signification in a subjective historicity abstracted by way of time, and construes this historicity as a correlate of the permanence of History.
“The past… exists only when a subjectivity is there to disrupt the plenitude of being in itself – to adumbrate a perspective, and introduce non-being into it.  A past and a future spring forth when I reach out towards them.”6

To accept a narrative is to accept temporalization as “something ready made”, as a multiplicity of psychic facts among which one tries to establish causal relations.  “passivity… is being encompassed, being in a situation –prior to which we do not exist – which we are perpetually resuming and which is constitute of us.”7

It is this resuming of a history, this constituting of history in the present, which is at work in the public discourse over the Pied Noirs.   Individuals insert themselves into a ‘passive’ historicity - as it is already there – and ask to be affirmed in the present – that “one single time which is self-confimatory which can bring nothing into existence unless it has aleady laid that thing’s foundations as present and eventual past, and which establishes itself as a stroke.”  It is ‘naive’ for it correlates the constituted historicity as History, without regard for History itself.  It is problematic for the same reason.

History, prior to intellection, seems non-other than an atemporal ‘nature’; that which resides outside of particular causal historicities and provides the ground from which historicities are abstracted, according to perspectival significance dialectics.  The problem with the competing historicities of the Pied Noir seems to be a logistical problem with thinking time, and no problem at all, if one properly understands the difference between ‘being for itself’ and ‘being in itself’.  

“If the ‘for itself’, the revelation of self to self, is merely the hollow in which time is formed, and if the world ‘in itself’ is simply the horizon of my present, then the problem is reduced to the form of temporalization.”8

The problem is an argument over the perspectival quality of the ‘for itself’ without consideration of the ‘in itself’.  Purely considering the ‘in itself’, there seems no need for “a synthesis externally binding together the tempora into one single time…because the ‘cohesion of a life’ is given with its ek-stasis.”  By virtue of being, one has history.  Nothing more is needed for its constitution. 

Yet alongside politics arises the motivation for the revival of ‘passive’ history.  The “external bindings” attribute a certain significance, and in this case, the significance becomes an object of political instrumentation.

The ‘passive synthesis’ of the intentional act to create a national narrative is to create an ‘ultimate consciousness as ‘timeless’.9  In the sense that the national narrative is not intratemporal”10 it is not reducible to all subjective time, therefore, certain historicities simply cannot be reduced to the narrative.

Merleau-Ponty concludes the chapter on a positive note: “two temporalities are not mutually exclusive as are two consciousnesses, because each one knows itself only be projecting itself into the present where they can interweave.  The living present opens “upon a past which I nevertheless am no longer leaving through, and on a future which i do not yet live, and perhaps never shall, it can also open on to temporalities outside my living experience and acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded to the dimensions of that collective history which my private existence takes up and carries forward.11 

It seems only positive in regard to temporality – in the sense that the present is the ground for the emergence of an instant woven of subjective acts in a inter-subjectivity.  This is no solution to the problem of the history of the Pied Noir.  Perhaps the insight that this is not a ‘historical’ problem at all, but ‘imminent’ in the sense that it remains constituted and held in subjectivity.  And so long as individuals constitute themselves according to a ‘passive synthesis’ of history, they will continue to live the conflict of that history.

1 A political utility of the state used to for unifying purposes.
3 481
4 481
5 490
6 489
7 498
8 501
9 486
10 491
11 503

[Merleau-Ponty] Structure and Perception [1]

This is an attempt to show what’s going on in the concluding chapter of Structure of Behaviour, and to situate its significance vis-a-vis Phenomenology of Perception.  These books were published in sequence – the former in 1942, the latter in 1945 – and together they present the novice phenomenologist with a plethora of mysterious words, phrases, and ideas. 

The concluding chapter reads of Structure of Behaviour reads as a critique of reductivist frameworks - empiricism and transcendental idealism in particular - as an approach to understanding the world in which man lives.  In identifying where these approaches fail, Merleau-Ponty is also sketching out how a phenomenological framework could be useful - the rendering of embodied experience as description.

In his critique, Merleau-Ponty speaks the language of the subject in which he is concerned.  This can initially be confusing, for he spends considerable time tracing the thought of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, acknowledging their conclusions.  For a first read-through, it seems like an affirmation rather than critique.  It also presents difficulty to the reader, for one must be fairly comfortable with the style and language of each actor.  The move to critique happens when Merleau-Ponty extends their thought to the domain of perception, and finds their thought unsuitable for this grounding factor.

I find Structure of Behaviour difficult primarily due to the rigor in which Merleau-Ponty challenges the “Classical Solutions”; according to their own standards, and with their own language.1  Whereas Structure of Behaviour therefore reads as a critique of solutions which do not account for perception (and with it, the problem of perceptual consciousness), Phenomenology of Perception is his attempt at rendering such an account.  It is with Phenomenology of Perception in which Merleau-Ponty stops the critique, and begins anew with a philosophy that “consists in relearning to look at the world”2.  With this, he venture out in a language decidedly his own.

It therefore follows that there is a noticeable change in tone and style between the two texts.  Since Structure of Behaviour is concerned with psychology, dualism, and transcendentalism, it is heavily intertextual and requires a fair breadth of context.  Phenomenology of Perception, on the other hand, seems much more intuitive.  Merleau-Ponty seems to take his time, casually directing the readers attention, shifting focus between his ideas, and the immediate experience at hand: for us, the reading, and for him, the writing.

This paper is structured as two sections and a conclusion.  Firstly, I will try writing on dialectic, significance, perspective, and Gestalt.  The second section is my understanding of the critique of the classical solutions, their limitations, and the necessity for a descriptive analysis of perception and how this informs consciousness.  Along the way, I’ll try to give an explanation of ideas that I feel are key, and what I find significant about them.

PART 1: Dialectic: a structure of consciousness in a procurement of significance

Merleau-Ponty concludes Part Three of Structure of Behaviour, titled “Physical, Vital, and Human Order,” with the question “What then is the relation between consciousness as universal milieu and consciousness rooted in the subordinated dialectics?”3  This question is an early offering of “the problem of perceptual consciousness” — a question which seems to motivate Merleau-Ponty’s exploration.

Leading to this question is suggestion that the “physical”, the “vital” and the “mental” are not “powers of being.”  I’m assuming that “powers of being” refer to some kind of Truth about being, or the nature of being, perhaps a metaphysical claim on being.  Instead, “aided by the notion of structure or form”4, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the developments implied by scientific representations of behaviour are best understood as dialectics.

A dialectic is therefore something that produces meaning.  Dialectics operate as planes of signification vis-a-vis the the world.  For example, the advent of ‘technology’ was also the advent of ‘thinking technologically’ - seeing the world as available, in some capacity, for technological use.  The electrical circuit gains meaning, for it can be used for technology.  Interestingly, it is only that one, vague, particular perspective which gives me perception of the particular electrical circuit; it does not seem to have other perspectives.  I suppose it is ‘flammable”, and ‘breakable’.

Dialectic produces meaning, but meaning is only significant in terms of something else; for example, money is meaningful with respect to economy.  “Gestalt psychology” helps to conceptualize this idea: things stand out from a background; meaning is contextual — things become discernible when we recognize the significance of that thing to an environment.  The significance we attribute to a thing therefore depends on the space in which we find ourselves with the thing and the approach we take to the thing; significance is abstracted according to dialectic; “every form of consciousness presupposes its completed form.”5

Perspective is “perhaps the essential property of things”6 because ‘reflective-consciousness’ is constituted by the dialectics, which are indeed the structures of consciousness.  Consciousness is therefore “rooted in the subordinated dialectics”, reflective consciousness.  But what then is the consciousness as universal milieu?  This seems more intuitive – the direct experience of being in the world.

Ideality seem to be dialectical structures we come to know through conscious reflection - perhaps taking a shape of ‘ideal forms’.  The ideality of a science comes by way of rational reflection and produces scientific knowledge, or knowledge in some ‘objective’ sense.  An ideality is therefore not reducible to a naturalist approach.   To study behaviour scientifically is to procure scientific data on the behaviour of a subject, not to explain behaviour.

Behaviour therefore cannot be explained by way of ideality, or dialectic, which is actually a form of consciousness.  Behaviour rests with consciousness, and prior to consciousness; it is something which encompasses the scientific, the mental, the physical and the vital; it is the outwards expression, while the other is the inward expression.  While the procurement of scientific data of behaviour is reducible back to the structure of behaviour7, behaviour is not reducible to scientific data.  From what I understand, this is the major theme in Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the classical solutions.

1. When concerned with empiricism or behaviouralism Merleau-Ponty makes use of scientific data to show the limits of empirical study.  Physiological anomalities are used for philosophical reference.
2. PP xx;xvi
3. 184
4. ibid.
5. SOB 201
6. SOB 186
7. SOB 221

The Pathos of Bathos [Nietzsche]

Could Nietzsche’s use of the literary exclamation reference a perspective of absurdity?

Could he denote, with exclamation, that a particular idea should not be linked to cultural context?  That an idea is so funny, so exciting - precisely because it exists prior to our conception of it?

The availability of an idea to be found, in itself, is absurd.  Of course, life is an abundance of absurdity; we no longer need to turn to Sartre for insight.  The absurd experience has become a dominating element of contemporary humor.  I mean, it’s easily found in pop-culture spanning Monty Python and Family Guy.

So, let’s wonder: What is a joke? The constituting punch line?  A context is built, we expect a constant - we receive a varient.  It surprises.

A joke surprises, and Absurdity surprises.  They seem to share this is common.  An Exclamation point is used to exclaim; to exclaim is to “cry out suddenly, especially in surprise, anger, or pain.” (Taken from my computer dictionary).  Further, it comes from the french “Exclamer”: Clamer = ‘To Shout’, oriented from the position of the root “Ex” = ‘Out’.  We exclaim our surprise at the absurd, and the absurd, by necessity, is something that “stands out”.

Something stands out when it doesn’t fit.  Why doesn’t it fit?  Because it is different than what is expected.  As creative, complex beings we are all aware of this sentiment!  Things happen!  Beyond the limit of control!  And as cultural beings, we document these experiences.  But how do we reference that point from which somethings stands out to us as absurd, and why would this be an important reference to acknowledge?

If Nietzsche is using an ‘!’ to denote something as personally exciting, then I will share his excitement biographically.

But if Nietzsche is using ‘!’ to note; reference; ‘scare’ us into a position - LOOK!  this is something ELSE!  I dont KNOW about it at ALL!  LOOK!!!  This is something INTERESTING, to objects of NATURAL BEING!  There is no requirement of cultural context!