tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 05 06:24:42 1999

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing



[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

bIQDeppu'?



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





Back to archive top level