Wastebook

(22.8.21) Protestantism at Kilkeel; Catholicism (/postcatholicism) at Carlingford at 6 euro ferry return over the Lough. A universe of binomial character. My eyes.

(28.8.21) Thoughts on ressentiment still have some way to run. Nietzsche, Scheler, Tomaselli even the 90-minute youtube on envy by Natalie Wynn (?) Could be interesting to read Schoeck on envy. The idea I'm floundering around is the residue left where something like ressentiment is accepted to make up a large (perhaps the largest?) part of the 'deep structure' of contemporary morality and belief, yet exhaustion (of the explanandum - a naive realist belief in the irreducibility of some aspects of uncontaminated or uncorrupted human or transhuman goodness - joy, generosity, kindness, compassion, etc., original good rather than original sin, - is rejected i.e. leaven of goodness is accepted as part of our ongoing lot alongside all the self-deception and self-poisoning. Is this possible withut recourse to supernaturalism (Scheler... and in a hazier way Bergson and Whitehead)? or without fully following Nietzsche's heroic-tragic antics and celebrating Dionysian cruelty as the supreme positive value? The most promising candidates at present would seem to be - here's the flounder - either (a) frameable in terms of caring, caring about... or (b) perhaps reframeable in terms of pre-aristocratic values but without the premise of ocio-genetic aristocracy - nobility, largesse , insouciance - at some point coming close to Bataillean potlatch, dépense. Here I get confused (between the notions of the poverty of thhe promise and that of it being over-extended.``

(5.9.21) No society without envy; no envy without society (Schoeck). In a radically depopulated world, the conditions for envy, though they would still exist (and there is surely still scope for us to envy the dead, the past and the planet) would be massively diminished.

(19.9.21) '"You ought to help people."

"Ought you?"

"Yes- at least, I can see the contrary argument, perhaps as a philosophical position you ought to leave them to rot, but when things are going wrong for them under your nose- yes." "(Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety p65)

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