Nietzsche and the Art of Insightful, Unhinged Polemic

Nietzsche is the most entertaining of philosophers, and certainly very insightful, but it frightens me to think that philosophical neophytes might start with him and be taken in by some of his unhinged polemics. Insight blighted -- and made entertaining -- by unhinged polemic such as this from Hollingdale's translation of Twilight of the Idols:

1. In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless... Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. Even Socrates said as he died: "To Live -- that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius". Even Socrates had had enough of it. -- What does that prove? What does it point to? -- Formerly one would have said (-- oh, and did say, and loudly enough, and our pessimists most of all!): "Here at any rate there must be something true! The consensus sapientium is proof of truth." -- Shall we still speak thus today? are we allowed to do so? "Here at any rate there must be something sick" -- this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these wisest of every age! Were they all of them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? decadents? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?...

And then:

3. Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sign of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? -- At least that famous physiognomist's opinion which Socreates' friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum -- that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely: "You know me, sir!" --

Madox Ford and The Good Soldier

From Ford Madox Ford's The Gold Soldier:

I
suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling came to the
surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her
room and might have prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I just couldn't do it; it would have been like chasing a scrap of paper--an occupation ignoble for a grown man.

Liberalism and Potentialities

In Dewey's essay, Philosophies of Freedom:

(the real fallacy of classical liberalism) lies in the notion that individuals have such a native or original endowment of rights, powers, and wants that all that is required on the side of institutions and laws is to eliminate the obsctructions they offer to the "free" play of the natural equipment of individuals. The removal of obstructions did have aliberating effect upon such individuals as were antecedently possessed of the means, intellectual and economic, to take advantage of the changed social conditions, but left all others at the mercy of the new social conditions brought about by the free powers of those advantageously situated. The notion that men are equally free to act if only the same legal arrangements apply equally to all -- irrespective of differences in education, and command of capital, and that control of the social environment which is furnished by the institution of property -- is a pure absurdity, as facts have demonstrated. Since actual, that is effective, rights and demands are products of interactions and are not found in the original and isolated constitution of human nautre, whether moral or psychological, mere elimintation of obstructions is not enough. The latter merely liberates fortce and ability as it happens to be distributed by past accidents of history. This "free" action operates disastrously as far as the many are concerned. The only possible conclusion, both intellectually and practically, is that the attainment of freedom conceived as power to act in accord with choice turns upon positive and constructive changes in social arrangements.

Mary Warnock on Thinking

From the chapter Materialism and Relativism in Hilary Putnam's Renewing Philosophy:

Mary Warnock once said that Sartre gave us not arguments or proofs but "a description so clear and vivid that when I thinhnk of his description and fit it to my own case, I cannot fail to see its application." It seems to me that this is a very good description of what Wittgenstein was doing, not just in the private language argument, but over and over again in his work.

George Eliot is a Wonder

From chapter 68 of Middlemarch:

For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie with an intensity disproportionate to the number of his direct misdeeds. But many of those misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they
bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire. And it is only what we are naively conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omniscience.

Slang and Poetry

Middlemarch really is full of fantastic epigrams. This one comes from the eleventh chapter:

"Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?" said Rosamond, with mild gravity.

"Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class."

"This is correct English: that is not slang."

"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets"

"You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point."

"Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter."

"Of course you can call it poetry if you like."

"Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to separate."

"Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!" said Mrs Vincy, with cheerful admiration.

Punctuation and a Lack of Red

From Chapter 8 in Middlemarch, concerning Casaubon:

'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

'No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semi-colons and parentheses,' said Mrs Cadwallader.