Sadly, as I’m about to see my father for the first time in 29 years this summer, I do know the pain of this first-hand.

Certainly intellectualism can–and does–coexist with “sensualism.” Just like ALL of the other facets and nuances of the human experience. The struggle that I face is recognizing and declaring the “mixture” that is representative of my own Self.

As for Russell, I have read “Marriage and Morals” and “The Conquest of Happiness” and bits and pieces of other of his works. He is definitely a “challenger.” [But probably a bit too logical for most of my contemporaries.]

That’s pretty cool. I actually do find that to be true as well, at least on the days I make the effort.

Ask me a different day, and you’ll get the existential cynic in me.

O, to be one or the other would probably resolve much of my dilemma.

************

But getting back to philosophical thought and relationship, I think I ought to investigate some more of Bertrand Russell’s works. He is considered to be one of the founders of analytical philosophy and he received the Nobel Prize in literature, and co-wrote Prinicipia Mathematica. Unlike Nietzsche, he was married, what…4 times? See what he has to say about the relationship of love in HIS intellectual life:

“At the age of 84, Russell added a five-paragraph prologue to a new publication of his autobiography, giving a summary of the work and his life, titled WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR.[43]

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

DAY-um. So perhaps intellectualism CAN co-exist with sensualism. Excellent. Now I don’t have to get a divorce. Who knew????

Thank you, ESwitch…

Nietzsche was a thinker, John Lennon and Bob Marley were philosophers. They better than anyone realized that there are an endless amount of ways in which to explore and express your “self”. Yet what came to be the recurring theme in both of their musics? Love. not harry met sally kissing in the grass making babies perpetuating the human race love, but ONE LOVE. God, Jah, Allah, YHWH. I think they were on to something.

i guess what i’m saying in summary is that faith for faith’s sake has made a lot more happy children than philosophy for philosophy’s sake.

“you think you are complicated, deep mystery to all, but it’s taken me a while to see, you’re not so special, all energy no meaning, with a lot of words, so paper thin that one real feeling could knock you down”
Miss Dido said that one in a song called “see you when you’re forty”

All “huge mountains” are made up of little things. There are no big things.

Methinks that improved “time management skills” might qualify under the broadened scope heading. Just as there are no big things, scope broadening is incremental…and simple.

Thanks. Peace!

“Usually my frustrations stem not from the specific activity but from some other area of non-resolve.”

I have many areas of non-resolve…one of them is the non-resolve of wanting to broaden my scope of achieving something beyond my four walls and not knowing what that is (having many desires and no definitive pull towards any of them – I frequently change my mind).

Anyway, I’m rambling on a minor irritation. I don’t want to make a huge mountain out of it.

“It might be time for the philosopher who thinks s/he is married to a “detractor” to broaden her/his scope.”

Probably. Or it might be a simple matter of learning some time management skills.

I have found that EVERY level of the human experience can and does stimulate the creative.

Some of my most “foundation rattling” epiphanies have come while washing dishes, sewing, crocheting, cutting the grass, changing diapers, wrangling with obstinate adolescents (children of all ages, actually), doing laundry, cooking, and any number of other “mundane” activities. Usually my frustrations stem not from the specific activity but from some other area of non-resolve.

Even if the philosopher refuses to stoop to the level of the cook or the dishwasher, SOMEBODY is washing the dishes.

It might be time for the philosopher who thinks s/he is married to a “detractor” to broaden her/his scope. Challenges to growth come in all sorts of packages.

Thanks for the comments!

Whether or not Nietzsche had someone actually love him, I don’t know. If he had, he certainly would have deflected their attentions in favor of his pursuit of his intellectual/philosophical goals.

He had definite views on the life of a philosopher and marriage:

On page 543 of *Basic Writings of Nietzsche in Genealogy of Morals: Third Essay, he writes:

” Every animal—therefore the philosophical animal, too— instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors, just as instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is “higher than all reason,” every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum (I am not speaking of its path to happiness, but its path to power, to action, to the most powerful activity, and in most cases actually its path to unhappiness). Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with that which might persuade to it—marriage being a hindrance and calamity on his path to the optimum. What great philosopher hitherto has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—they were not; more, one cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in comedy, that is my proposition—and as for that exception, Socrates—the malicious Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition.”

Apparently, the philosopher is married to his work, not to a woman, who would detract from his serious contemplations. Did he take a long term lover? I wonder.

I can relate…completely to Nietzsche’s sentiment. As an intelligent, introspective and quasi-philosophical married woman and wanna-be writer, I find myself conflicted and sometimes even irritated over having interruptions to my thought processes by ordinary things like dishes, child care and being requested to snuggle when I want to think or write.

It’s, in some regards, terribly selfish, but it’s true. Writers, philosophers, poets, artists, and their ilk are often married more to their idea(l)s which can makes it very difficult to make room for people on a long term basis. Sure, there is some satisfaction to be had, but there is a constant tug in two directions – the more tranquil (read: boring) existence of domestic “bliss” and the siren call of the creative/thinking life.

Personally, I think, some amount of suffering brings out creativity as much as ecstasy does. I CAN’T lead a suffering-free life. And I am not sure I want to. I need those major swings between the highs and the lows. But that’s just MY weirdness.

Oh, and Nietzsche coined one of my most favorite aphorisms: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This aphorism was one that got me through MANY a tough nights when I struggled with suicidal ideations.

And yeah, your presence on this blog was missed.