I'm Such a Nerd, Two Flavors of Me Come in a Small Box

Thought I'd make some remarks involving intensely nerdy things.

• Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn involves the statement, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. It might seem false, but it's actually an application of the transitivity of equality. See, Beauty and Truth are both the Good, as apprehensible by the senses and the intellect respectively. B=G and T=G, therefore B=T. Maybe Nietzsche should've paid more attention in math class.


• Why do people think Wittgenstein was such a great philosopher? Oh, assuredly, he was smart, and he certainly had more common sense than Bertrand Russell, but his assertions about language's relation to philosophy are, in the absolute most generous interpretation, a poorly done bootleg of Mitigated Realism—at worst, they're unintelligent Nominalism, combined with a souped-up Maimonidean Via Negativa. As I said in my last post, judge a philosopher by the number of things he puts beyond reason: Wittgenstein is a nigh-unmitigated failure as a metaphysician and epistemologist.


• So TV Tropes has two tropes, Authority Equals Asskicking, for how in many works Generals and Kings are the most powerful guys in their armies, and Asskicking Equals Authority, for systems where rank is gained on the basis of martial prowess. But what's interesting is, in any system where the second holds true, the first holds true, too, ipso facto. It's an usual thing for there to be commutativity of trope names.


• Nietzsche's morality is, in essence, aesthetics—beyond the Slave Morality of Good and Evil is the Master Morality of Good and Bad, but if you actually look at the kinds of things he talks about, the Master Morality really boils down to Cool and Lame.


• While I was writing my last post, I couldn't recall the name of vitalism, and had to look it up. Wikipedia claims that Hindu, Greek, and Chinese thought are vitalist, because of their concepts of qí/prana/pneuma. But they're not. Indeed, all three of those philosophies have as a fundamental doctrine that all things are composed of the same four or five elements, and "life" is the presence of a certain energetic relationship between them. Possibly the article's writer was misinterpreting those cultures' essentially pantheistic worldview—they really do treat the Cosmos as if it was alive—as a belief in there being something special about life. Actually in Aristotle it was the opposite: life emphatically wasn't special, because the universe itself was an organism.