Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce.
Kenny SmithThe anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns.
Kenny SmithIn all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist."
Kenny SmithSo successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising.
Kenny SmithNietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce.
Kenny SmithSoul one might say is more imperfectly infinite than spirit, because soul tends to abolish the ego-consciousness that it absorbs or overwhelms, reducing its particularizing structure to pure sublime feeling (immediacy); but spirit is more successfully infinite than soul, even though also more difficult and abstruse, because it digests the functions of consciousness into itself and thus preserves and deploys the senses and intelligence of conscious ego to higher ends.
Kenny Smith