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Showing posts from June, 2025

Inventing the Language of Thought: Saussure, Nietzsche, and the Conceptual Innovation of Calculus

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AI art Introduction In science and philosophy, some problems remain intractable not for lack of intellect, but due to the absence of an adequate language in which to formulate them. Concepts may be dimly intuited—even felt with urgency—yet resist articulation until a fitting symbolic system is constructed. This principle is well illustrated by the development of calculus, where a new mathematical idiom allowed thinkers to address the problem of change. The same logic applies beyond mathematics. In the intellectual evolution of Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche, we observe moments when inherited terminology failed, prompting the creation of novel conceptual vocabularies that opened entirely new terrains of thought. The Expressive Breakthrough of Calculus Before the seventeenth century, problems involving motion, limits, and infinitesimal change lay beyond the expressive capacity of classical mathematics. The frameworks inherited from Euclid and Archimedes, while rigo...

A Language of One’s Own: Nietzsche’s Self-Critique and the Saussurean Logic of Philosophical Semantics

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AI art   Introduction: Regretting the Borrowed Concepts In 1886, more than a decade after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy , Friedrich Nietzsche returned to his early work with a sharply self-aware preface titled An Attempt at Self-Criticism . In §6 of this retrospective, he reflects: “I now regret the fact that at the time I did not yet have the courage (or the presumptuousness?) to allow myself in every respect a personal language ( eine eigne Sprache ) for such an individual point of view and such daring exploits — that I sought laboriously to express strange and new evaluations with formulas from Schopenhauer and Kant, something which basically went quite against the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as against their tastes!”¹ This is not a mere admission of youthful hesitance or rhetorical failure. Nietzsche articulates a deeper insight: that inherited conceptual languages are not neutral instruments but structured systems with internal constraints. By atte...

Derrida, Différance, and the Hidden Semantics of LLMs

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The Operator. AI art Introduction In an era of artificial intelligence fluent in natural language, our understanding of meaning and expression is being reconfigured. Beneath the surface of text generation lies a complex mechanism—one that does not simply retrieve stored content, but instead constructs responses by navigating a dynamic space of structured influence. Surprisingly, this computational process echoes a radically philosophical account of language. Jacques Derrida’s theory of différance , arche-writing , and the trace —originally aimed at dismantling metaphysical assumptions in Western thought—offers an unexpected framework to grasp how today’s language models operate. These philosophical insights do more than metaphorically resemble neural architectures; they expose the deep structure of signification in systems that appear to lack memory, intention, or voice. Through a deconstructive lens, the workings of large language models (LLMs) can be read not as mechanical output...

A Running Thread: Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan in An Attempt at Self-Criticism §5

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AI art Nietzsche’s Diagnosis: The Will to Perish In §5 of An Attempt at Self-Criticism , Friedrich Nietzsche offers one of his most scathing critiques of Christian morality, describing it as a force that “from the very first… was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life” ( Übelkeit und Überdruß des Lebens am Leben ).[1] This morality, he argues, does not reject suffering—it rejects vitality itself. Nietzsche names this rejection in a series of powerful terms: the “will to perish” ( Wille zum Untergang ), the “will to disown life” ( Wille zur Verneinung des Lebens ), and an “instinct for annihilation” ( Instinkt der Vernichtung ). These are not simply moral descriptors; they articulate a deeper ontological and psychological conflict. Morality, for Nietzsche, is not a counter-belief but a counter-valuation ( Gegenwerthung )—a systematic devaluation of the instincts of life, a negation rooted in ressentiment. Dionysus vs. the Eternal “No” Nietzsche’s co...

Dionysus vs the Romantics: Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Revolution

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Friedrich ’s  Übermensch . AI art Introduction When Friedrich Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, its reception was swift and scathing. Fellow philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff issued a blistering public response, deriding the work as “a new philology”²—a dismissive jab at what he saw as Nietzsche’s abandonment of scholarly rigor. But the backlash extended beyond disciplinary boundaries. Nietzsche’s vision of art, suffering, and vitality subverted not just academic conventions but the deeper cultural values shaped by Romanticism. At the center of this confrontation lies a bold and unsettling claim: great art does not emerge from despair, but from an excess of strength. The Romantic Ideal of Redemptive Suffering Romanticism, dominant in Europe from the late 18th to mid-19th century, privileged passion, subjectivity, and the sublime. Its central aesthetic conviction was that beauty arises through pain—that suffering is not only a catalyst for creatio...