tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 05 06:24:42 1999
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bIQDeppu'?
- From: Carleton Copeland <[email protected]>
- Subject: bIQDeppu'?
- Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 17:23:54 +-400
- Encoding: 56 TEXT
jatlh joel anderson:
> I've actually made the opposite argument - that is, that the absence of a
> verb for "to love" indicates a society so brimming over with love that
> they don't even consider the need for a word for it. (Do fish have a
> word for water?)
jIja':
Well, fish might have as many words (glubs?) for water as eskimos do for
snow or bedouins for sand. (They supposedly have lots.) Russianists like
to cite the lack of a word for privacy in Russian as evidence of attachment
to age-old collective/communal traditions. Actually, I think such huge
cultural assumptions are dangerous unless tested in the context of the
culture as a whole. But this is where I really have trouble with your
theory. Do you see Klingon society as "brimming over with love"? I think
of it rather in the words of an immortal Klingon philosopher. tIqIm:
"The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power
over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes
pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence
for all that is severe and hard. "Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast,"
says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul
of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for
sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: "He who has not a
hard heart when young, will never have one." The noble and brave who think
thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees, precisely in
sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinteressement, the
characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical
enmity and irony towards "selflessness," belong as definitely to noble
morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in the presence of sympathy
and the "warm heart."--It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is
their art, their domain for invention. The profound reverence for age and
for tradition--all law rests on this double reverence,--the belief and
prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical
in the morality of the powerful ...
...The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged
revenge both only within the circle of equals,--artfulness in retaliation,
raffinement of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies
(as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance--in fact,
in order to be a good friend): all these are typical characteristics of the
noble morality ...
... A type with few, but very marked features, a species of severe,
warlike, wisely silent, reserved, and reticent men (and as such, with the
most delicate sensibility for the charm and nuances of society) is thus
established, unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations; the constant
struggle with uniform unfavourable conditions is, as already remarked, the
cause of a type becoming stable and hard."
vIrIyDrIH nIytche', *Twilight of the Idols; or, How One Philosophizes with
a Hammer*
http://www.cwu.edu/~millerj/nietzsche/twilight.html