In a Garden of Lions: a Creative Rendering Inspired by the Three Metamorphoses of Friedrich Nietzsche
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A decade ago, during the summer of 2002, I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It made an indelible mark: even the colors and smells of that roof-top porch in Toronto where I read it all the way through still arise in the forefront of my mind every time I think of this text. Since then, I have been captivated with the writings and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and have sought to understand this interest whenever possible. It is with this introspective eye that I have engaged this thesis project, using the last section of his text as a jumping off place and a touch point. I choose to use a story from my own childhood and to explore some of the relevant themes through visual interpretation. Inspired and cautioned by Nietzsche’s suggestion that, "We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation" (WTP, 283), I have engaged both textual language and visual language in this project. The textual part of the story is secondary however, to the visual.\nMy interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he attempts to illuminate our presumptions and foundational belief systems in a way that is highly effective, or at least can be if we are willing to face the light of his insight with the courage of a truly critical eye—looking both at his words as well as ourselves. His ultimate goal as a philosopher is stated as a will “to…constantly transform everything we are into light and flame; everything that affects us, too—we can do nothing else” (GS, 6). This intentional practice of ‘self-transformation’, or ‘self-overcoming’ is a primary theme in Nietzsche’s work and one that mirrors the human impulse towards growth and inevitable evolutionary process. It is my intention to engage this process through this creative project.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".