Thread Killer Champions: Franzbear & Moonbear

[Huckleberry]

What kind of priveledges comes with being a Minion of Smurf? Would I get a cool costume?

 

[Smurf]

God damnit, how am I supposed to quote the entire scripture of "Homer and Classical Philology" if I can only post 20,000 characters at a time!

 

[Smurf]

What kind of priveledges comes with being a Minion of Smurf? Would I get a cool costume?

Depends on your position, if you do a good job I'll give you an Island when I take over the world, if you do a really good job I'll give you a country.

 

[Smurf]

At the present day no clear and consistent opinion seems to be held regarding classical philology. We are conscious of this in the circles of the learned just as much as among the followers of that science itself. The cause of this lies in its many-sided character, in the lack of an abstract unity, and in the inorganic aggregation of heterogeneous scientific activities which are connected with one another only by the name “philology.” It must be freely admitted that philology is to some extent borrowed from several other sciences, and is mixed together like a magic potion from the strangest liquids, metals, and bones. It may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival—an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behavior. Philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or aesthetics: history, insofar as it endeavors to comprehend the manifestations of the individualities of peoples in ever new images and the prevailing law in the disappearance of phenomena; natural science, insofar as it strives to fathom the deepest instinct of man, that of speech; aesthetics, finally, because from various antiquities at our disposal it endeavors to pick out the so-called “classical” antiquity, with the pretension and intension of excavating the ideal world buried under it, and to hold up to the present the mirror of classical and everlasting standards. That these wholly and different scientific and aesthetic-ethical instincts have been associated under a common name, a kind of sham monarchy, is shown especially by the fact that philology at every period from its origin onwards was at the same time pedagogical. From the standpoint of the pedagogue, a choice was offered of those elements which were of the greatest educational value; and thus that science, or at least that scientific aim, which we call philology, gradually developed out of the practical calling originated by the exigencies of that science itself.

These philological aims were pursued sometimes with greater ardor and sometimes with less, in accordance with the degree of culture and the development of the taste of a particular period; but, on the other hand, the followers of this science are in the habit of regarding the aims which correspond to their several abilities as the aims of philology; whence it comes about that the estimation of philology in public opinion depends on the weight of the personalities of the philologists!

At the present time—that is to say, in a period which has seen men distinguished in almost every department of philology—a general uncertainty of judgment has increased more and more, and likewise a general relaxation of interest and participation in philological problems. Such an undecided and imperfect state of public opinion is damaging to a science in that its hidden and open enemies can work with much better prospects of success. And philology has a great many such enemies. Where do we not meet with them, these mockers, always ready to aim a blow at the philological “moles,” the animals that practice dust-eating ex professo, and that grub up and eat for the eleventh time what they have already eaten ten times before. For opponents of this sort, however, philology is merely a useless, harmless, and inoffensive pastime, an object of laughter and not of hate. But, on the other hand, there is a boundless and infuriated hatred of philology wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the modern man falls down to worship himself, and where Hellenism is looked upon as a superseded and hence very insignificant point of view. Against these enemies, we philologists must always count upon the assistance of artists and men of artistic minds; for they alone can judge how the sword of barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble dignity of the Hellene; and how no progress in commerce or technical industries, however brilliant, no school regulations, no political education of the masses, however widespread and complete, can protect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric offenses against good taste, or from annihilation by the dreadfully beautiful Gorgon head of the classicist.

Everyone should read this, it's very important to every day life and achieving the American dream. You will die old and lonely if you do not study it extensively and ignore everything posted before it.

 

[Smurf]

While philology as a whole is looked on with jealous eyes by these two classes of opponents, there are numerous and varied hostilities in other directions of philology; philologists themselves are quarreling with one another; internal dissensions are caused by useless disputes about precedence and mutual jealousies, but especially by the differences—even enmities—comprised in the name of philology, which are not, however, by any means naturally harmonized instincts.

Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science. With this contrast the so heartrending and dogmatic tradition follows in a theory, and consequently in the practice of classical philology derived from this theory. We may consider antiquity from a scientific point of view; we may try to look at what has happened with the eye of a historian, or to arrange and compare the linguistic forms of ancient masterpieces, to bring them at all events under a morphological law; but we always lose the wonderful creative force, the real fragrance, of the atmosphere of antiquity; we forget that passionate emotion which instinctively drove our meditation and enjoyment back to the Greeks. From this point onwards we must take notice of a clearly determined and very surprising antagonism which philology has great caused to regret. From the circles upon whose help we must place the most implicit reliance—the artistic friends of antiquity, the warm supporters of Hellenic beauty and noble simplicity—we hear harsh voices crying out that it is precisely the philologists themselves who are the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of antiquity. Schiller upbraided the philologists with having scattered Homer’s laurel crown to the winds. It was none other than Goethe who, in early life a supporter of Wolf’s theories regarding Homer, recanted in the verses: “With subtle wit, you took away our former adoration, the Iliad you may us say, was mere conglomeration. Think it not crime in any way: youth’s fervent adoration leads us to know the verity, and feel the poets unity.” [Goethe: “Homer wieder Homer,” in Epigrammatisch. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), founder of classical philology as a scientific discipline, and author of Kleine Schriften (Minor Writings; Nietzsche read the 1869 edition), Prolegomena ad Homerum (Prolegomena to Homer, 1795), Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft (Representation of Antiquity, 1807).] The reason of this want of piety and reverence must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle of theirs. When, however, even the friends of antiquity, possessed of such doubts and hesitations, point to our present classical philology as something questionable, what influence may we not ascribe to the outbursts of the “realists” and the claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: “But who then has found fault with him?” I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few in this gathering; for they may still be frequently heard from the lips of noble and artistically gifted men—as even an upright philologist must feel them, and feel them most painfully, at moments when his spirits are downcast. For the single individual there is no deliverance from the dissensions referred to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has nothing whatsoever to do with the quarrels and bickerings of its individual disciples. The entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity—which is perhaps only the magnificent blossoming of the Teutonic longing for the south—and the real antiquity; and thus classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pretension—the aspiration for it is very real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity, but to it; and that, just when people are speaking unwarrantably of the overthrow of sacred shrines, new and more worthy altars are being erected. Let us then examine the so-called Homeric question from this standpoint, a question the most important problem of which Schiller called a scholastic barbarism.

Quoted for Emphasis

 

[Smurf]

Once again my loyal minions has said something that needs to be QFE'd

The important problem referred to is the question of the personality of Homer.

We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion that the question of Homer’s personality is no longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing from the real “Homeric question.” It may be added that, for a given period—such as our present philological period, for example—the center of discussion may be removed from the problem of the poet’s personality; for even now a painstaking experiment is being made to reconstruct the Homeric poems without the aid of personality, treating them as the work of several different persons. But if the center of a scientific question is rightly seen to be where the swelling tide of new views has risen up, i.e. where individual scientific investigation comes into contact with the whole life of science and culture—if anyone, in other words, indicates a historical-cultural valuation as the central point of the question, he must also, in the province of Homeric criticism, take his stand upon the question of personality as being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the whole argument. For in Homer the modern world, I will not say has learnt, but has examined, a great historical point of view; and, even without now putting forward my own opinion as to whether this examination has been or can be happily carried out, it was at all events the first example of the application of that productive point of view. By it scholars learned to recognize condensed beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile figures of the life of the ancient peoples; by it they for the first time perceived the wonderful capability of the soul of a people to represent the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of a personality. When historical criticism has confidently seized upon this method of evaporating apparently concrete personalities, it is permissible to point to the first experiment as an important event in the history of sciences, without considering whether it was successful in this instance or not.

It is a common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The zenith of the historical-literary studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their point of greatest importance—the Homeric question—was reached in the age of the Alexandrian grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric question had run through the long chain of a uniform process of development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed to be the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity. They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the skepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain the different general impression of the two books on the assumption that one poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the poet’s life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for discrepancies in the language and the thoughts of the two poems; but at this time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. It was believed that Homer’s poem was passed from one generation to another viva voce, and faults were attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards. At a certain given date, about the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been repeated orally were said to have been collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed themselves to take some liberties with the text by transposing some lines and adding extraneous matter here and there. This entire hypothesis is the most important in the domain of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of our admiration. From these times until the generation that produced Friedrich August Wolf we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum; but in our own age we find the argument left just as it was at the time when the power of controversy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as a hypothesis. It may be remarked a most characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the strictest sense, the personality of Homer is treated seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations of the personality; and that, with these two excellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric. But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place of wishing to recognize the supernatural existence of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-increasing energy and clearness. Individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever more forcibly demanded. If we descend backwards from this zenith, step by step, we find a guide to the understanding of the Homeric problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle—i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go still further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period let's us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as Homeric. In this backward examination, we instinctively feel that away beyond Herodotus there lies a period in which an immense flood of great epics has been identified with the name of Homer

And I repeat: This is not conscription.

 

[Moonbear]

But, even if you keep it AT level PG-13, do NOT keep it at the level of 13-year olds..
(Some here at PF fail in this..)

Well, unless of course they ARE 13 (we do have members who are 13 or 14).

 

[Smurf]

I have a new Idea, I'll just post in every thread under this one, so that way I'll push it off the page and no one will be the wiser.

I'm such a genius.
Now, where to start

 

[Smurf]

Damnit! I'm too late! FLEE MY MINIONS! FLEE WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME!

 

[Moonbear]

I have a new Idea, I'll just post in every thread under this one, so that way I'll push it off the page and no one will be the wiser.

I'm such a genius.
Now, where to start

I've tried that. Then some schmuck always comes along and posts in this one again, destroying hours of careful effort to bury this thread off the page.

 

[Smurf]

I've tried that. Then some schmuck always comes along and posts in this one again, destroying hours of careful effort to bury this thread off the page.

Hmmm, maybe if we work together we can do it!

 

[Moonbear]

She's off-line right now; so if you spam the thread real good, she might not notice..

Which she is not supposed to notice?

 

[Smurf]

Dayle Record. Definitly Dayle Record.

 

[Moonbear]

Hmmm, maybe if we work together we can do it!

Yeah, okay, don't post anything after my reply here and get to burying those other threads.

 

[arildno]

Do you really think I want to be minionized by you, Smurf?
How rude even to suggest such a thing..
The very least you could have done, were to honey your words in such a manner that I might have grown to like the idea of it..

 

[Huckleberry]

Once again my loyal minions has said something that needs to be QFE'd

And I repeat: This is not conscription.

I don't know who posted this originally, but it wasn't me. I make lots of short paragraphs because my attention span isn't long enough. Too much tv as a child I suppose. Where did this come from anyway, and who is using my name in this forum if it isn't me? Am I being framed?

And Ill pass on being a Minion of Smurf. I have no use for a city or country. I just wanted the cool costume.

 

[Smurf]

Stop Doing That! This Thread Needs To Be Buried! Start Shovelling My Minions!

 

[Smurf]

I don't know who posted this originally, but it wasn't me. I make lots of short paragraphs because my attention span isn't long enough. Too much tv as a child I suppose. Where did this come from anyway, and who is using my name in this forum if it isn't me? Am I being framed?

And Ill pass on being a Minion of Smurf. I have no use for a city or country. I just wanted the cool costume.

Fine! I'll give you a cape with "LOYAL MINION HUCKLEBERRY" printed on it and a golden trophy, now start shoveling!

 

[arildno]

Oh, so you leave the actual shoveling and digging to us?
Well, I don't know about that either..
Gotta think about it.

 

[Moonbear]

Do you really think I want to be minionized by you, Smurf?
How rude even to suggest such a thing..
The very least you could have done, were to honey your words in such a manner that I might have grown to like the idea of it..

Honeyed words...hmmm...is that this color? If you don't want to become one of Smurf's minions, how about becoming one of my minions? I think I offer a better benefits package. There's unlimited access to the laundromat; you can even invite your dates over to join you on the turbo-charged 18 hp Maytag. Um, then there's the protection we offer from the Artman families. We've got pretty good relations with the Southwest families though, so no need to worry about them (though, we have to keep a bit of an eye on them with SOS running the show while tribdog is staying on the down-low). Oh, and then there's the biology lessons; we have a back room in the laundromat for those.

 

[Smurf]

Arildno, you are correct, it was wrong of me to try to minionize you. You are a far too noble and proud zaddick to be placed under me, perhapse if you were to help shovel this thread your brilliance and glory will be recognized by all and I shall of course bow down in worship to you.

 

[arildno]

Whizzing off to google up on what "zaddick" means..
EDIT:
WHAT?
Should that be an "s"?
How evil and unforgivably rude..

 

[Smurf]

Allow me to save you the time my great. Zaddick is a term originating from the Hebrew word Tzaddik which appears in the Hebrew to describe a number of true beleivers, it has come to mean a Just and Virtuous person.
I hope I have pleased you my lord.

 

[Smurf]

Gah! I give up on burying this thread, someone else can do it.

 

[Moonbear]

I just wanted the cool costume.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, all of my minions get really cool costumes. Dark blue with silver trim for the rookies and gold trim for the captains. Oh, and poofy hats. That's always a sign of an elite squad of minions, and a great ploy to hide your true cunning and strength from the enemies. They're always fooled by the poofy hat, until you swoop down with surgical precision and we take the thread! Muwahahahahaaha!

 

[Danger]

It scared the hell out of me when I woke up after my traditional 4 hours of sleep and found an additional 3 pages here. What a relief to find out that 2 1/2 of them were Smurf, so I don't have to read them.

how about becoming one of my minions? I think I offer a better benefits package. and then there's the biology lessons; we have a back room in the laundromat for those.

I hadn't considered the benefits package before. Maybe I'll consider miniondom under your domain. Since you have to stay off your back for a couple of weeks, I'd expect you to be in charge anyway.

 

[BicycleTree]

So Moonbear, why are you posting in orange? Something happen in the last few pages?

 

[Smurf]

lol, YOU THINK?

 

[Huckleberry]

Sorry Smurf, I'm going to have to go with Moonbear's offer. Shovelling is more of a hobby while swooping has been a passion ever since I jumped of the porch when I was a child because I thought I could fly. I also tried to lift myself up by my feet, but that's another wallydraigled story.

Swoop!
Huck

 

[Smurf]

You've all been brainwashed.