you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Nombre27 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This is a must read

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/499234.The_Fame_of_a_Dead_Man_s_Deeds

Pierce's singular dedication to his race was inspired by this play

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Superman

"One of the things that helped me find direction was a play that I first came upon at Caltech back in 1955 or so - Man and Superman. Act three of the play was the one that really struck me. It expressed the idea that man shouldn't hold himself back. He should completely use himself up in service to the Life Force. I bought a set of phonograph records that just had that act in it. As I remember, it had Charles Laughton, Charles Boyer, Agnes Morehead, and Cedric Hardwicke - it was well done. Don Juan's expositions were what resonated with me. I listened to that set of records over and over and let it really sink in. The idea of an evolutionary universe hit me as being true, with an evolution toward higher and higher states of self-consciousness, and the philosopher's brain being the most highly developed tool for the cosmos coming to know itself. I felt I understood what Shaw meant. Over time, I have elaborated upon this idea - I came to call it Cosmotheism - and discussed it in a series of talks I gave in the 1970s."

...

After reading and seeing the play, it became clear what it was about this particular play that so captured Pierce's imagination at that time in his life. The central question the play explores is the very one that Pierce himself was confronting: what is the most important thing to do with one's life? And not only was the question relevant to Pierce's life at that point, the answer Shaw gives to that question through this play had great appeal to Pierce, and that was to give your all to being a "force of Nature," so to speak. In prefatory remarks to the published version of the play, Shaw wrote:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes you recognize to be base.

...

Life's central impulse is to move toward the creation of a superior kind of human being, Don Juan asserts. That is what Life, at its core, is about. Here Don Juan is expressing an evolutionary, Darwinian idea, the concept of man evolving into something higher, more advanced than he is now. Life as Don Juan perceives it is the force that seeks to bring about "higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being, omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god." 8 Don Juan brings race into it as he affirms the "great central purpose of breeding the race; ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman; that purpose which is now hidden in a mephistic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight...."

Text from here

https://archive.org/stream/FameOfADeadMansDeedsRobertS.Griffin/Fame%20of%20a%20Dead%20Man%27s%20Deeds%20-%20Robert%20S.%20Griffin_djvu.txt