Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption


Came across this today. A lot of posts bring up the issue of "how much is enough?" or "when is audio consumption justified" etc.

Does this Nietzsche aphorism apply to audio buying? You be the judge! 

Friedrich Nietzsche“Danger in riches. — Only he who has spirit ought to have possessions: otherwise possessions are a public danger. For the possessor who does not know how to make use of the free time which his possessions could purchase him will always continue to strive after possessions: this striving will constitute his entertainment, his strategy in his war against boredom. 

Thus in the end the moderate possessions that would suffice the man of spirit are transformed into actual riches – riches which are in fact the glittering product of spiritual dependence and poverty. They only appear quite different from what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to mask themselves with art and culture: for they are, of course, able to purchase masks. By this means they arouse envy in the poorer and the uncultivated – who at bottom are envying culture and fail to recognize the masks as masks – and gradually prepare a social revolution: for gilded vulgarity and histrionic self-inflation in a supposed ‘enjoyment of culture’ instil into the latter the idea ‘it is only a matter of money’ – whereas, while it is to some extent a matter of money, it is much more a matter of spirit.” 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Cambridge University Press. (p. 283-4, an aphorism no. 310)

I'm pretty sure @mahgister will want to read this one! (Because they speak so artfully about avoiding the diversion that consumption poses to the quest for true aesthetic and acoustic excellence.)

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If a god is a pasta-being, would a lasagna be the consorting of gods and mortals?

a god is a pasta-being, would a lasagna be the consorting of gods and mortals?

Sort of like communion only tastier. 

Great post!

Benjamin is spot on even when he is slightly wrong like N. he points to some truth, because there is no lies in a "sismograph" indicating the tremors agitating mankind...B. and N. are disguised angels on a mission to awake mankind...

These spirits are treasure to meditate, hard to read and easy to contempt like someone contempting a tool he cannot use or would never dare to try to understand...

if we read this Benjamin quote to the letter , this quote is true to the letter, the only piece who lack to understand B. about N. is the unrecognized "possessed" in a way "daemonic" genius of Bernard Mandeville who before N. himself generated in advance the essential tools and deep methods of mass controls and manipulation and foundation  of the Capitalist and Marxism cult to come...Others will refine them...

Hitler was more a german idiosyncrasy of the German defeat created by Banks With Versailles treaty and the full capitalist  backing of the Monster in spite of his disgusting racism...

Thanks for this great thread indeed at least for me et few others...

As much as people deride Nietzsche, wow -- what energy he generates. If I want a short thread that dies quickly, I’ll go with Kant or Aquinas! In fact, I think Nietzsche is better than even Chomsky for generating light and heat.

Then again, there’s Benjamin...he could light things up! Viz., "capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed….Capitalism is the celebration of the cult [without dream or mercy]…each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper….entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet “Human” through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment." [Capitalism as Religion (Benjamin, 1921)]

But let’s not attack all our gods at once! Ignorance is bliss, amirite? ;-)

 

Another deep aspect of the B. quote :"God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence." is very deep..

Man is double, a polarity , like his heart is a beating polarity in his dynamic and geometry...

We are eternal consciousness without a limited "ego", a spirit and at the same times, we are a limited ego...

Sound/music for me is an expression in the limited world of the Plenum or pleroma of souls singing which is the pure meaning of music itself manifested in Bach or in any other musical experience playback or playing ...Remember that music is not reducible to physical sound....No more than meaning is reducible to spoken words or written one...

Then the soul/body polarity and the ego/spirit polarity or the sound/music are all expression flowing from one eternal source on earth and other cosmos kingdoms...

A finite object exist seemingly on one level of the scale, it is why we claim it is finite...But infinite being or spirit lived on at least 2 levels at the same time...Any finite object is the emerged tip of an hidden "iceberg" manifesting an another dimension anyway....

If everything exist all in the same level or dimension or "bag" so to speak, everything is meaningless. Structure imply design and design cannot exist without 2 levels of reality...

There is a clue about the apparent noise in the world and an hidden order manifesting through it...I posted an article from a doctorate thesis about the "fractal notion of the Brownian noise"... It is readable without too much mathematics but those mathematically inclined may look at the thesis attached to the article.... I am the first to read Mandelbrot, unknown completely when he publish his first book in french in 1975 when it arrived the first day from France in quebec city... This is a book who changed my intellectual landscape...I am very proud of that and i apologize for my pride... 😁😊