- Jul 2024
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Kurutz, Steven. “Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides.” The New York Times, June 13, 2024, sec. Style. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/style/now-you-can-read-the-classics-with-ai-powered-expert-guides.html.
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- Great Books of the Western World
- The Great Books Movement
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- philosophy
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Annotators
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- Feb 2024
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Local file Local file
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It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, notonly that God is dead but that “faith in science, which after all existsundeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must haveoriginated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness ofthe ‘will to truth,’ of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it constantly.”
Joy quoting Nietzsche
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- May 2022
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
Saving the entire story for context, but primarily for this Marshall McLuhan-esque quote:
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
I want to know the source of the quote.
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Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
We should also take into account his age, his failing eyesight, his mental state, etc. It may not have just been his typewriter.
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- Dec 2021
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Even so, new inventions have always influenced literary production, as Friedrich Nietzsche, who struggled with a semi-spherical typewriter, once lyrically observed: “The writing ball is a thing like me: made of / iron / yet easily twisted on journeys.”
Probably overbearing, but this is also the exact sort of thing a writer faced with a blank page is apt to focus on as they stare at the type ball in front of them. Their focus isn't on the work its on the thing immediately in front of them that isn't working for them.
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- Sep 2021
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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Friedrich Nietzsche once identified three approaches to the writing of history: the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical, the last being history “that judges and condemns.”
Nietzche's three types of historians:
- monumental
- antiquarian
- critical
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- May 2021
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jhiblog.org jhiblog.org
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“Sibi scribere: The reasonable author writes for no other posterity than his own, for his own old age, in order to take pleasure in himself even then,” Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche (here, 83).
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As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz a century later, “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”
This is a fascinating quote and something I've thought about before. Ties to McLuhan's "the medium is the message" as well.
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