Weltgeist
@WeltgeistYT
Philosophy videos. Focus on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
This is a Caspar David Friedrich painting called Cross in the Mountains. Looks innocent enough... Yet, it was accused of being blasphemous and insulting to God. Find out why in our latest video. Link in reply:
This is the desk of Gabriele D'Annunzio
Dudes like this were already gay. I’ve been married for 14 years and have never been home decor shopping, or even had an opinion on the subject, except for the one time when I had a painting custom made depicting me meeting a group of space aliens. It’s now hanging above a…
Imagine you're a young man, you like literature, and the biggest brightest superstar of the time, just so happens to be a good friend of your mother. Of course you want to meet your idol. But your mom won't let you, because you're "annoying." That's Schopenhauer & Goethe.
Schopenhauer also speculated that the New Testament is so fundamentally different from the Old, namely in its anti-worldliness and moral message, that it had to have roots in Eastern philosophy
Yeats speculates on the relationship between the Gita and the Gospels:
Goethe speaks in admiration for the scientist Alexander von Humboldt:
"I am pondering over the Tristan legend. It is marvellous how that work constantly leaps from out the darkness into full life, before my mental vision. Wait until next summer, and then you shall “hear something”!" - Richard Wagner in a letter to a friend
When he was 11 years old, a boy from Richard Wagner's school tragically died. They hosted a competition for the best elegy; Wagner competed and won. The poem is not preserved. Later, Wagner remarked he didn't remember the words, and that he'd love to see his "Opus I" again.
Dostoevsky's characters are caricatures, that's part of the charm. They are histrionic, unmeasured, theatrical. They're not so much personages as they are psychological types. It's easy to see how that's not to the taste of some people, especially someone like Nabokov.
"After orgasm, the devil's laughter is heard"
Someone once said that artists as a rule are always at least halfway disgusted by sex. Anyway here's Joris-Karl Huysmans in "Là-bas":
Romeo and Juliet have to die because the alternative, a happily ever after, is comical. Can you imagine Romeo and Juliet in old age, the tedium of normal life, the domestic squabbles, the petty small-talk? It would take away from the intensity of their romance, and love.
Something like a... will to life? A... struggle for existence?
A new archetype is here. A ferocious desire to exist. A rebuttal of death and its causes.
Another great passage on the tediousness of scholarship: “Surely they lose all sense of hope and pleasure That knock their hollow heads against this stuff. Their greedy fingers dig for buried treasure, But if they find some worms they're proud enough”
The main conflict in Wagner's Ring begins because Alberich gets rejected by girls. In response he forswears love entirely, which allows him to steal the Rhinegold. Compare Shakespeare's Richard III: "Since I cannot prove a lover ... I am determined to prove a villain"
This is reversed by Brünnhilde; Alberich exchanges love for power. Brünnhilde exchanges power for love, when she willingly undergoes Wotan's punishment, is stripped of her immortality and godhead, and willing to be saved by Siegfried.