Nietzsche and Runaway Audio Consumption

@ebm Everyday we learn a bit more about what we don't know. Ain't that a hoot?

@artemus_5  My take on his comment about only spirit being able to have possessions is the same reason we don't want children to have opiates. They can take them but then the drugs would take them over. In this case, only someone with mastery over themselves can handle the danger posed by possessions.

I take "spirit" to mean someone who defines their own path, has their own intentions, and is not in the grip of others' sway. A "sense of what they are about" or "genuine character" might be a good way of seeing his point. We are either creators or followers. We have "spirit" or "slavishness." Hope that helps.

Nietzsche was not depressed. He didn’t have blinders on but that’s different. 

Well said @snilf !!!

@snilf @snilf  Good point about aphoristic works, and I took a risk, but I thought the quotation made enough internal sense for it to be related without trying to "size up" Nietzsche, which many know is either impossible or a lifelong occupation.

I happen to be reading Nietzsche because I occasionally teach him. I'm a philosophy professor.

Regarding you comment about the "corruption" of the real passion that happens sometimes, all I can do is echo Steve Guttenberg's explanation that sometimes the audiophile is really interested in sound itself -- not as a vehicle to music but for its own textures. That seems fine to me, too. The only problem with loving sound is when it somehow *substitutes* for music. That doesn't mean that music is better than sound, only that I was diverted from my purpose, on that occasion.

@mahgister @mahgister 
"There is no corruption of music by love of sound... There is an unending unsatisfaction by ignorance of the way to embed optimally a system in his mechanichal, electrical and acoustical dimensions...Then the upgrading deceptive road is chosen…"

I think this happens a lot. I did listen to a system yesterday that had the room right and the gear very very right — GR Research Super 7's with incredible mono block tube amplifiers. It was sublime.

Regarding Benjamin, I agree completely, especially your point that "the aim of reproduced music is NOT, as it might seem, to re-create an impossible lost original performance, but rather, to provide an authentic experience of its own, an experience of a new kind of artwork"

A good article on this general question is here: 

[Listening to Music: Performances and Recordings Author(s): Theodore Gracyk Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Spring, 1997, Vol. 55, No. 2, Perspectives on the Arts and Technology (Spring, 1997), pp. 139-150]

 @mglik   Nietzsche is anything but a nihilist. He questions the kind of life lived by people who automatically accept and then enact values that are imposed from others because that effectively prevents one from being, themselves, a creator of value.  The ideal of the ubermensch is a goal -- a way of life in which one seeks to create rather than merely obey. Create what? What they will.

@sns @sns The Pirsig reference struck me. Nice. I can imagine building audio systems as either spiritual work or delusion — but not either, necessarily. It depends on whether one has mastered oneself and know one's own purposes, which is the issue that initially lead me to the Nietzsche quote in the OP.

@tunefuldude @tunefuldude — 

"this idea of how our spirit is tied in w/ our individual level of fulfillment as we pursue this hobby of ours, is how well content we are, at peace you might say, with whatever equipment we currently posses, or use to enjoy it."

 -- exactly! As for whether you're an "intellectual" or not, well, in America that word is mostly used as a pejorative. So I won't say I thought your observation was very intellectual -- I'd opt for "insightful" and "illuminating," instead! 

@sns Fair points. Regarding data, increasing amounts of it are being used to subtly guide our spirits in profitable directions, all the while maintaining the illusions we are in full control. We don't get to keep those profits of course; we generate them for others.

It stops being a conversation if one person posts most of the time. With all due respect to the energy and enthusiasm of our monologist, I'm unsubscribing from my own thread. 

@sns   Very well said. 

Here's my quick take — audiophiles do contribute to the artistry by making their systems. They feel power in making the sound immersive, in bringing music and bodily feeling into synergy with the room.

What was once a cold piece of machinery is embedded (agree, Mahgister) into the larger space of their home thanks to their actions: knowledgeable care in selection, arrangement, positioning, adjusting of all in the environment.

Pride and self satisfaction is warranted. I like nothing more than to experience what another audiophile has created and talk to them about how and why they did things in that unique way. In effect, I'm asking for their spirit to sing its song to me.

Pet psychological theory about when audiophiles go too far — over-consume or are dogmatic about the gear: we need to make our own music, too. Too many of us, me included, don't play an instrument anymore. We "make" music by playing the music of others. If more of us were at least singing, playing music with others from time to time, we'd be less frustrated. That frustration comes from trying to fulfill deeply creative urges with audiophile pursuits *alone*. That's not enough to satisfy a lot of us.

Omigod you leave a thread for a few hours and....

@jpwarren58 

"No conspiracy or master plan but an incoherent commercialization of culture"

Agree, except for the plan part! It may not be master, but the incoherence most experience yields a fair amount of control and profit for, let's say, .1%. 

[ahem]

@tubebuffer  Please do not generalize about philosophers, or put them down. All kinds of people become philosophers. We are doing our best to make sense of the world and act kindly toward other people. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Take some peace into your heart, hold it there, and let it out by being nice to someone else.

@jpwarren58 Tsk tsk! (And I thought "trigger" was just a horse in Hollywood. Do you spike your hamsters' water with caffeine, too? ;-) )

It's even sillier to post about something silly.

Enjoy your retirement.

As much as people deride Nietzsche, wow -- what energy he generates. If I want a short thread that dies quickly, I'll go with Kant or Aquinas! In fact, I think Nietzsche is better than even Chomsky for generating light and heat.

Then again, there's Benjamin...he could light things up! Viz., "capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed….Capitalism is the celebration of the cult [without dream or mercy]…each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper….entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence. This passage of the planet “Human” through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory is the ethos that Nietzsche defined. This man is the superman, the first to recognize the religion of capitalism and begin to bring it to fulfillment." [Capitalism as Religion (Benjamin, 1921)]

But let's not attack all our gods at once! Ignorance is bliss, amirite? ;-)

If a god is a pasta-being, would a lasagna be the consorting of gods and mortals?

Wow, you start a little fire, go away for a while, and come back to find the whole neighborhood is ablaze. 

I agree things are on fire in many ways. I'm not a disengaged person, but I like to talk about audio on Audiogon, even if I stretch the connection a bit with some Nietzsche.

You're free to talk about and argue about whatever you like, of course.