Nietzsche
	Dionysus Chaos Romanticism Mythical Superstition Ignorance Pre-Socrates	Dionysus absorbs the Apollinian «------ "Dionysian" ------» The death and reaffirmation of life		Apollo Form Rationalism Reason Absurdity Socrates (Fully Developed)

Romanticism: the cult of passion, not from fullness but naive aesthetics. Rationalism: a temporary fix which eventually becomes absurd in need of re-creative passion.

	Left			Right
	Rationalism Equalitarianism Capitalism Marxism Socrates	«--------------»		Passion, Art Creativity Non-Equal Nietzsche Max Weber (Self Created Values)

Outline Taken From The Closing of The American Mind - by Allan Bloom Ø      American Virtue o       From openness in transcending ethnocentricity; a land with equalitarian rights for each individual, as individuals, individual “rights.” o       To openness to closed groups – separate group rights – open to ethnocentricity amongst groups, thus nihilism and value relativism the norm. §         “The blessing given by the whole notion of cultural diversity in the United States by the culture movement has contributed to the intensification and legitimization of group politics, along with a corresponding decay of belief that the individual rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence are anything more than dated rhetoric.” P. 193 Ø      The Clean State – The State Clean of Roots o       Culture of Europe – roots in the classics, independent thinkers, depth of teachings instilled, inculcated in the individuals. o       Culture of America – formerly roots from the bible, to now being defunct, to surface thoughts in television, journalism, education in MBAs’, and the loss of classic books, shelved with the labels of accusations of racism, sexism, prisoners to public opinion. Ø      Books o       America – The bible is no longer instilled, and when it is, it is not recognized for its aesthetic, symbolic and cultural meanings, but reduced to literalism and fundamentalism. Lower level writers have replaced the classics – the great thinkers – which have been accused of sexism, racism and prejudice in cultural relativism; the ethnocentricity of different groups. o       Europe – The classics remain – classics thinkers within each culture, although this has changed with the states in relativism and rationalism. Ø      Music o       Commercially motivated music rules the young minds. §         Adult passion instilled in non-experienced youths. §         Passion over romance. Instant gratification over the sublime and aesthetic. §         Surface desires of sex, fame and money over depth of character. Ø      German Influence in American Thinking o       Creativity in cultural depth of German thinking applied to a non-cultural and rationalistic country with its lack of depth in aesthetics and artistic positing, resulting in cultural relativism. o       Increase in Nihilism and the bourgeois mentality (the “last man,” the mediocre, petty, surface man, the economist over the artist). Ø      Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature o       Locke §         The nature of man is for him to be self sufficient, for self-preservation of each individual using dominion and exploitation over nature and the environment. o       Rousseau §         The nature of man is the same as above but with a passion and attachment towards nature and wholeness. Individual needs nature to become whole. o       French Revolution §         The French Revolution failed from its depth of culture and paradoxical questions of existence and nature of man, diversities of art and creative expressions, from differentiations of rooted character. o       American Revolution §         The American Revolution succeeded from its lack of depth, its surface rationalism built on a frame without a basement. Ø      The Idea of The Self o       Machiavelli – dismantle – cease living for the religious future soul destination and live in the present for the self and self-improvement. o       Hobbes – cease thinking formulations and live by one's feelings and desires for the self. o       Locke – Let go of virtues and live for the self – selfish in being self sufficient, which in turn, contributes to the whole and others. The self must come first in a societal structure based on catering to the self – a false sincerity to respect the rights of others for the preservation of one's own rights. o       Rousseau – search to restore the self with nature, to restore wholeness. o       Socrates – contemplation and rational thinking the way to inner nature and the true (higher) self. o       Descartes – dismantling the self from nature as the self-being his ego. Man is all ego, that is, his control center, his ego is only an extension of nature. The self thinks and therefore it is. “I think and therefore I am.” Ø      Creativity – the deeper grasp of the true character. o       Originally meant as a unique distinctive quality of artistic expression. o       Equalitarian society relativizes creativity, leveling, minimizing, and weakening the “real” artists with creative abilities and expressions along with the mediocre, all being petty and mediocre. Ø      Culture o       Acquired teachings, roots and art over natural instinctual man o       Morality over instinct. o       Desires civilized in artistic expression. o       Form to chaos – yet chaos remains alive in form and expression, apart from dry rationalism. o       Duty built on foundations over instinctual or natural inclinations. o       Rationality with universality, which sublimates passions; neither represses, nor denies. §         Sex ·        Non-culture of America puts reason and self-preservation over pleasures. ·        Culture is the sublime expression of passions and sexuality in art. o       “Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bonds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science. Culture founds the dignity of man. Culture as a form of community is the fabric of relations in which the self finds it diverse and elaborate expressions. It is the house of the self, but also its product.” P. 188 “The idea of culture was established in an attempt to find the dignity of man within the context of modern science. That science was materialistic, hence reductionist, and deterministic. Man can have no dignity if his status is not special, if he is not essentially different from the brutes.” P. 193. The end result of the many dualism formed by those wishing to create a dignity of man verses science, is that culture really does not include science and science cannot really respect the dignity of man. “In general, everyone wants to be scientific and at the same time to respect the dignity of men.” P. 193 o       Historical foundations and over natural instinctual man. §         Culture in Politics – the legislator, the statesman. Values - Dewey and the United States - thinks rational thinking are based on absolute truths " holding "We hold these truths as self evident." - Weber calls the above immature and points to Nietzsche's description of the "last man," the mediocre, petty, superfluous man. - Marx tries to replace God with "History," that is, historical knowledge is what forms man. - Thucydides shows that it was the loss of traditions and myth that brought forth rationalism in politics that brought forth the downfall of Greece. - Plato formulated that it is man that creates both what is good and the gods, not the other way around. - Nietzsche changed the self-satisfied atheism into an agonizing atheism, one of a tense bow and internal war of the opposites, with the idea that all values are created from nothing - the "id," - Freud tried scientifically analyzing the "id," the unconscious. His paradox was that in his refusal to acknowledge anything beyond science, science itself was created from this nothing, this no-thing, the mysterious, the "id." - And so Nietzsche calls us to this "id," our true and higher selves, this no-thing, calling it a fatum, as a suborn ass that does not at all communicate with us, except simply that it "is." Only the rarest individuals find their own fatum, their own stopping point from which they can move the world. They are literally, profound.