Get more saints! At http://virus.lucifer.com/saints.html all I see is one - St. Charles. That's all well and good, but he wasn't aware of genetics; it took lots of later evolutionary biologists to put it all together. Plus, for a church that bases so much of its teachings on memetics, it seems like at least one prophet in that field should be canonized.
So what's the deal? Even if you're following tradition and waiting till people are long-dead and beatified, there are some oldies but goodies out there who should fit in nicely.
Re:More saints!
« Reply #1 on: 2003-07-01 05:02:35 »
It has been discussed from time to time. Voltaire and Nietzsche have been candidates (Popper might be another, but probably lacks sufficient general currency to have the same impact as either of those or Darwin). My own view is to just get on with it and beatify both of the above.
Re:More saints!
« Reply #2 on: 2003-07-01 10:47:40 »
Let's not forget our existing proposals. Hypatia daughter of Theron - Six Yeas None opposing or abstaining George Eliot - Two Yeas, One abstention Francoise Marie Arouette better known as Voltaire - Two Yeas, One abstention Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis - One Yea, One abstention
Suggested but not formally proposed (and I note that some of these remain alive which automatically disqualifies them, while others were advocates of irrational religion which does the same):
Shannon & Weaver Von Neumann Alan Turing Charles Sanders Peirce Ferdinand de Saussure A. J. Greimas Louis Hjelmslev Charles Morris Thomas Sebeok John Deely Umberto Eco Maurice Merleau-Ponty Aldous Huxley George Orwell Herman Hesse Stanislav Lem Franz Kafka Herman Melville Mark Twain Anthony Burgess Vladimir Nabokov Fyodor Dostoyevsky Jose Luis Borges John Barth James Joyce Jerzy Kosinski Thomas Pynchon Don DeLillo Salman Rushdie J. D. Salinger Nikolai Gogol Nietsche Russell Karl Popper Ambrose Bierce Chaucer Macchiavelli Hobbs
It should be noted that the proposer is expected to produce a motivational document advocating the reasons why their proposed saint should be elected, while noting any reasons why they should not be. In the event of a proposal being accepted, a poll will be held to measure the support (or otherwise) of the congregation.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
what's coming through is alive, what's holding up is a mirror... totally void of hate, and killing me just the same... coming over like a storm again now considerately.
Re:More saints!
« Reply #7 on: 2003-11-24 19:11:34 »
maybe some saints that will be more recognisable to the casual random googler. I propose Da Vinci, I dont know that much about his personal beliefs and whatnot, but the guy certainly had vision and vision is always a good start
If I could chip in I would be strongly in favor of canonizing Nietzsche. I should also like to write a small essay on the merits of the man but I cannot do this before the 8th.
Keep in mind that Nietzsche is a very controversial candidate and that some of his ideas on evolution were both dead wrong and absurd.
Never the less he was a brilliant philosopher who basically arrived at some of the same conclusions as Darwin by thought alone.
Additionally, as I will show in my essay, Nietzsche is the herald of post-modernism in the same way that Darwin heralded genetics. Both men laid down the ground work, so to speak.
Voltaire might add an artistic element to our communion but in his capacity as a thinker he pales besides Nietzsche who was just as anti-christian.
Da Vinchy was definately christian and therfore right out.
Bill Hicks is certainly sharp. But grand enough to be a saint? It is my impression that most people already know that they are being screwed by shady governments and big industry.
In closing, I would just like to request that we keep the communion small and interesting rather than end up with 10-18 random medicore saints.
“Every genius causes a revision of one or more of life’s fundamental questions.” - Søren Kierkegaard
The life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is a tale of many misfortunes and much suffering. Ever since early boyhood Nietzsche had held a strong affinity for music. He started composing at age 14 and it was not until well after the age of 20 that he finally acknowledged to himself that his musical abilities were mediocre at best. Nietzsche also struggled to cope with a lifelong series of health problems which became particularly humiliating for him when he voluntarily signed up to fight in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 but was discarded on his way to the front for being too fragile. Later in his life he experienced a devastating blow to his self-esteem when the woman he truly loved turned down his proposal of marriage and he was cast into financial insecurity by his former employers at the University of Leipzig who dismissed him due to his extreme attitude towards Christianity.
Yet when this failed composer, soldier, lover, and professor put his pen to the writing block sparks flew! It is not without good reason that Nietzsche is known as one of the most provocative and radical thinkers in the history of western thought.
The painful events of Nietzsche’s life led him to acknowledge, like Schopenhauer before him, that opposition, pain, and suffering were unavoidable elements of a natural life. However, as we will see he did not react to this insight with the apathetic fatalism that Schopenhauer had shown but with a fiery appetite for what he considered to be life in its purest form.
A doctor of classical philology, Nietzsche treasured the passion for life that he had found in the culture of ancient Greece before it had been corrupted by the twin evils of Platonism and Christianity. Therefore his philosophy calls for us to throw off the yoke of these old values, this meme of meekness and conformity which constituted slave morality to Nietzsche. He maintained that such a morality could no longer exert influence over the lives of strong and independent individuals, whom he called Uebermensch, and expressed this idea in the proclamation that God is dead. Yet beyond the death of God and the absolute rejection of metaphysics and the disintegration of values, lurk the dark dangers of nihilism. For Nietzsche it is absolutely imperative that man does not simply fall prey to spiritual despair and descend into apathy.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Nietzsche
This is why Nietzsche takes on the challenge of constructing a new set of values as well as a new, non metaphysical, ideal and this is why a large part of Nietzsche’s philosophy is devoted to justifying what he calls natural life. Perhaps more than any other thinker, Nietzsche unveils to us the many untapped joys of this life. By dismissing all dreams of heaven man enables himself to enjoy this life to the greatest possible extent. Memento Mori.
So what is life? What replaces metaphysics and slave morality for the Uebermensch and what does it do once it has come to terms with a Dionysian acceptance of life? Individualistic in the extreme, the values of the Uebermensch vary from being to being but according to Nietzsche every Uebermensch is driven by will to power and its values will be manifested in a master morality. The Uebermensch is subject to deep passion and strong emotions but controls both of these rationally. The master morality emphasises strength and despises weakness as weakness is will inevitably perish under the conditions of natural life. The will to power hails the individual freedom to do as one pleases as well as the power to exert control over those weaker than oneself. When combined, these world views take the Uebermensch beyond good and evil.
In the last of his writings Nietzsche takes this concept of beyond good and evil to a whole new level and questions not just morality, metaphysics, and values but the value of truth itself. All scientific research, he argues, originates from the metaphysical belief that the truth is necessary and beneficial. For even if the scientist is godless he clings to the Platonic belief that God is truth and that truth is divine. To the old Nietzsche there can be no truth and all thought is fictive and false.
Shortly after this Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he would never recover. A physician was called and quickly proclaimed ”Mit Nietzsche ist es aus!” (Nietzsche is done!). He spent the last 11 years of his life in a state of deep insanity. A state which allowed the sister Elizabeth to take control of her brother’s notes and alter them so that they would in accordance with her anti-Semitic views. She then proceed to pass these thoughts of as his, in the book ‘The Will to Power’ which was published a year after his death.
In the cause of his lifetime, the sister and her husband as well as Richard Wagner had repeatedly tried to convince Nietzsche to embrace anti-Semitism yet Nietzsche rejected thought that Jews should be of inferior blood as well as the notion that the German people constituted a master race. Nietzsche wanted the Uebermensch to be to the human what the human is to the ape and the Uebermensch does not arise from race nor gender but from pure power and strength.
Friedrich Nietzsche leaves us with an exceptional philosophy devoid of any system yet also devoid of metaphysics and full of contradictions. He is perhaps the most human of all the great thinkers and although his views cannot be taken to be absolute his writings have been immensely influential. By identifying, defining and the determining the origin of morals Nietzsche did some groundbreaking work in the field of psychology upon which Sigmund Freud later based his theories on the superego. His thoughts on individual freedom and hedonistic absurdity of a non-metaphysical world served as a major source of inspiration for the French existentialists Jean-Paul Satre and Albert Camus, and his attacks on truth and reasons launched the anti-rationalist movement which in turn forced the school of reason to evolve and meet these challenges. Finally, Nietzsche’s complete revision of values would later coin the concept of value-relativity which formed the core principle of European cultural radicalism and eventually it enabled post-modern thought.
I agree that Nietzsche was the origin of some important memes, but in his lifetime he failed to propagate them. I don't think that matters though - we seem to praise the quality of memes rather than the efficiency of their spread. We actually canonize Nietzsche (or Darwin) the memeplex, not Nietzsche the person or meme-vector, because the goal of the canonization is to promote the memes, not to reward the original host. That's my understanding of it, anyhow.
Anyway, I (for one) feel conservative about this, and don't want to award every influential thinker with sainthood. I'd rather keep it to just the ones whose memes, we all agree, should be spread in this medium. Nietzsche isn't that kind of figure, in my very humble opinion.
I'm going to risk humiliation and accuse Blackwater of plagiarism in this essay, because in the title of the post he/she misspelled Nietzsche's name, and in his/her little quotation at the end, he/she used the nonwords "mediocracy" and "mediocore." That doesn't seem consistent with the erudite (and grammatically correct) style of the essay (except for the insufficient quantity of commas, and the misspelling of Sartre's name). My Google searches of randomly chosen blocks of text didn't find anything, so all I have to go on is that inconsistency in Blackwater's command of the English language, and the fact that this essay really doesn't seem to have been written for the purpose of convincing Virians that Nietzsche is worthy of canonization - it seems more to be an undirected biography, informative rather than persuasive. This must be how grade-school teachers feel. I don't mean to insult Blackwater's writing ability; I'm just suggesting the possibility he/she didn't write this at all.
Frankly I am a little offended that you would accuse me of plagarism. Nevertheless I shall attempt to answer your critiques rationally.
I am a Dane. English has always been largely a spoken langauge for me. Thefore, my spelling abilities leave much to desire, especially when compared to my ability to form fluent sentances. By the same token, I don't know much about punctation. This is why my commas are set according to the one rule "if in doubt, leave it out".
I am inclined to agree with you with regards to this essay's lack of direction. I wrote this influenced by Hermit's article on the illumination of Hypatia in Ideohazard which I at least percieved to be excatly what you call my essay: "An undirected biography, informative rather than persuasive." Reading though the thread again though, perhaps I should have plotted a different course for this piece.
About my profile signature: I had to re-activate my profile yesterday. In doing that I selected a new, avatar, personal text and signature and no - I was not aware that "mediocracy" and "mediocore" wasn't words. IIRC i got them from Salieri's closing line of the Amadeus film though I might be wrong. What words would you use instead?
Mediocrity is the noun and mediocre is the adjective, FYI. Your English is better than my Danish. I can (and do) buy really good ones at a Scandinavian bakery a few miles away, though.
Hermit was right to be informative rather than persuasive, because the point there was to tell us all about Hypatia's life, rather than to convince those in power to canonize her, as those in power had already been convinced. But I'm not saying you didn't already agree with this; it just needed to be said. In order to prove I'm not just a bundle of offenses, I'll add that I think yours would be an excellent biographical essay to put forth Nietzsche's memeplex if he were to become a Virian saint; I'm just not convinced that he should.
I expect most people will interpret my tone as patronizing or pedantic; I'm trying to avoid sounding that way but to a certain degree the very content of my posts requires it. Try to do what I try to do - divorce tone from content and ignore the former.
At any rate, there's probably nothing more to be said about the plagiarism accusation. I won't withdraw it - I maintain that it seems slightly suspicious to me - but I have no new arguments in favor of that position. If Blackwater is telling the truth, there's probably nothing else that he/she can do to prove it either. Any more debate would just be unconstructively aggressive or defensive; I believe all the arguments that can be made for each side have been, so all that remains is for readers to make their own judgments. I have nothing else to say about it.
I have to take some philosophy classes to really get my head around this place, but hey, I'm still (quite) young and (moderately) healthy...
My knowledge of Nietzsche so far is that he claimed God was dead, which on one hand makes him qualified because he denied God, but on the other hand implies he acknowledged the existance of God prior to His death, which makes him less qualified. So I guess I'll get back to you about this after philosophy class, okay? =)
Problem is, few atheists are famous simply for being atheists, so the fact that they invented this or had interesting new ideas about that usually gets in the way.
May I suggest that we take a break from this and get started on the excommunication of about 90% of the world? =P
Re:More saints!
« Reply #14 on: 2004-04-05 21:59:25 »
What Nietzsche meant when he said "God is dead" is that belief in God was no longer helpful. In the past, theistic religions have helped the growth of society - Nietzsche was simply stating that their age had passed, not that there was actually a God who was actually dead.
Author
Logged
