About this Blog
I suppose I should demystify – but only a little! – this blog’s title and purpose.
Over the last two years, my ruminations on ethics and philosophy of mind – the two branches of philosophy that have most hooked my imagination and intellect – have steered me into the dark, yet enlightening jungle of the unconscious: the wild, evolved, fiercely competing drives that run the show behind the sunlight of conscious desire. And having returned to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche after a long (all-too-long!) hiatus, I found this very idea cloaked in glorious, terrifying, dark-purple prose:
“What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger” ~“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (my emphasis)
What a fascinating, frightful image! What a penetrating insight! – a precursor to, and likely influence on, Freud’s theory of the unconscious. I feel the same shivers when I read William Blake’s iconic poem:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?… ~ “The Tyger”
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