File spoon-archives/bataille.archive/bataille_1999/bataille.9908, message 69


Date: Sun, 08 Aug 1999 22:49:08 -0400
From: marsha faizi <mfaizi-AT-rbnet.com>
Subject: Re: silence


>From Beyond Good and Evil:


   It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught:
   one must "know" it by experience - or one should have the pride *not* to know
   it. The fact that at present people all talk of things of which they *cannot*
   have any experience, is true more especially and unfortunately as concerns
   the philosopher and philosophical matters: - the very few know them, are
   permitted to know them, and all popular ideas about them are false. Thus, for
   instance, the truly philosophical combination of a bold, exuberant
   spirituality which runs at *presto* pace, and a dialectic rigor and necessity
   which make no false step [100% certainty], is unknown to most thinkers and
   scholars [i.e. "those with university degrees in philosophy"] from their own
   experience, and therefore, should anyone speak of it in their presence, it is
   incredible to them. [ ! ]  They conceive of every necessity as troublesome,
   as a painful compulsory obedience and state of constraint; thinking itself is
   regarded by them as something slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble, and
   often enough as "worthy of the *sweat* of the noble" - but not at all as
   something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance!  "To
   think" and to take a matter "seriously", [ ! ] "arduously" - that is one and
   the same thing to them; such only has been their "experience." [snip] There
   is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation
   of rank in problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly
   everyone who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their
   solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is it
   for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy honest mechanics [ ! ] and
   empiricists [ ! ] to press, in their plebeian ambition, close to such
   problems, and as it were into this "holy of holies" - as so often happens
   nowadays!  But course feet must never tread upon such carpets: this is
   provided for in the primary law of things; the doors remain closed to those
   intruders, though they may dash and break their heads thereon! [ ! ] People
   have always to be born to a high station, or, more definitely, they have to
   be *bred* for it: a person has only a right to philosophy - taking the word
   in its higher significance - in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, the
   "blood," decide here also. [....]

===================
 J. Foster wrote:

> So you are an admirer of Fred are you?

Can you think that this summation of yours can place me in a bag?  Most people do
not understand most of what Nietzsche wrote; not because it is too complicated but,
in most instances, because it is too simple.  What is more simple than a glance in
a mirror?  Nietzsche was not a moralist.  He  expressed inversions of morals.

> I find him a hopeless wheezing wind
> bag but very good at the shallowest of aphorisms.

Then, you have not read his work in the proper way.  A keen sense of humor is the
way to insure the best understanding.

> His best and perhaps his
> only great work was the "Birth of Tragedy" wherein he contrasts  the
> Apollonian with the Dionysian mind/tradition in Greek culture.

You select one of his earliest works when he was most closely associated with the
academic world.  It is probably most natural that you would select this.  I
consider it to be his most mundane work.  I consider that, in many ways, Ecce Homo
is his most remarkable work.  I do not think that it is absolutely true, for there
are always exceptions, but I do think that it is somewhat true that one must be
over the age of forty to fully appreciate the possibility of this.  I read the work
when I was in my twenties and it made no impact.  I read it when I was past forty
and it struck me with the hilarity of its certain truths.  I read it in one night
and I rolled on my bed with laughter.  The content of the book was made all the
more remarkably hilarious when contrasted with the somber introduction written by a
professor from whatever university who clearly had made his living on the study of
Nietzsche.  This professor wrote in somber tones of the tragedy of the ensuing
madness of this great philosopher.

I read the contents of the book and I thought, "If Nietzsche was mad, then, I am
mad, too, and glad of it."  Indeed, I would rather be mad than to be an idiot who
receives a small salary in compensation for being a shriveled up piece of tree bark
with no more mind than a dead tree.

> He should
> have stuck to philology, and ceased his constant moralizing. I think he
> raised a lot of the 'rabble' to war later in Germany with his sick theories,

His sister who was anti-Semitic was the cause of the Nazi connection.  She was
responsible for certain alterations in the manuscripts that later lent themselves
to Nazi pleasures.  Nietzsche, in his lifetime; in his lucid state; was repulsed by
the anti-Semitic brooding of his time.  His sister married a leader in the cause
against Jewry.  She was only too anxious to use the writings of her famous brother
for the purposes of such a cause.

> not his healthy theories though. He would have been able to play away in
> acedemia had he not had congenital syphilis.

He stopped playing in academia long before he went mad.  It has never been proven
that he had syphilis.  There are many causes of organic brain disease and there are
many causes for depression that can completely overtake a person.  Near the end of
his sane life, Nietzsche had ample reason for despair.  He was disillusioned with
the life of the university.  His publisher was no longer willing to publish his
work.  He had always been fragile.  I do not find it hard to imagine how such a one
who was in possession of so great a mind with so delicately strung ideation's and
strength of conviction could succumb to his own sensitivities.  He was ill suited
to work as we know it.  He had tried being a nurse and a soldier.  He was good at
neither.  His entire strength lay in the vestibules of his mind.  He lived entirely
in the mind.


> He reminds me of a great big
> bullfrog sitting on the railroad tracks, croaking, not knowing where the duce his
> butt is, or a cicada that cannot shut up in the rainforest.

There are many people who see him this way.  However, as Ariosto cautioned, I do
think that it is necessary to get past what could be construed as emotionalism in
Nietzsche.  I do not see any particular emotion in his writing.

> I like cicadas but sometimes they test me with their constant singing.
>

I like 'em, too.  I have not heard them this summer as I usually do.  Too dry for
cicadas, I reckon.  There have been times that I have gone out on my deck hoping
for a little quiet only to have to listen to the noise of cicadas.  Sometimes, they
have been so loud that I could not hear a voice on the telephone.

To me, Nietzsche's voice and tone are not like that of a cicada.  He is not so
loud.

 Well perhaps you could post the evidence for your observations on academia?

I have posted this before.  I hate to bore others and, mostly, I hate to bore
myself.  Most of my evidence involves personal experience.  If I was a wrestler, I
would be Philosophy and my arch rival would be College Professor.  Philosophy would
be the good guy, of course, while College Professor would be the ultimate evil.
That would be a good bout, I reckon.


> I agree that there are a lot sad cases in academia, caged up animals in
> fact.

Then, it is not necessary for you to ask me for evidence.

> Are those the specimens you refer to? I am not one of them. I work for
> a living. I would love to engage in the parapatetic [pacing back and forth]
> mode and encourage young souls to do the same. Those who fill up a seat in
> academia are really just playing around, you know. Some of them get out in
> the summer and go to work though.
>

So, what do you do to work for a living?

> I am curious. How do you make the inference that respect must be demanded?
> It would appear to me that 'respect', as you define it, is another name for
> love, or at least one attribute of love.

I do not think of respect as love.  Love is a hallmark of emotion.  Respect is a
point of honor.

I do not demand respect in the sense of verbally stating, "I demand it."  My
presence demands it. I demand it through my writing.  I demand it with my mind.
Because I demand it, it is forthcoming.

> That is what Eric Fromm claims in
> "The Art of Loving". What about reciprocating love and respect? Are you also
> implying that you would be willing to reciprocate respect in return if it
> was offered to you?

I am not willing to reciprocate respect in return for respect.  That would be an
act of some frivolity. Respect or, more precisely, honor is something that must be
earned or that must be readily apparent from one's demeanor and manner.  It is not
something to be accorded lightly.

> Is it not true  that you cannot receive respect from someone if you demand
> it in the first place? To demand respect from someone is to well put the
> cart before the horse, so to speak?

I do not think that this is necessarily true.  As I wrote previously, the demand
for respect is not something that is expressed verbally.  It is a demand that is
issued through one's actions.

Can you force someone to have respect when they don't have respect?

No, I cannot force it.  I demand it and it is forthcoming.  My demand requires no
effort.


> There is of course the usual natural respect that we have for strangers,
> people in the streets and others we meet on a casual basis, but to actually
> demand respect from someone ...that is a hard thing to demand.

I do not find it to be a hard thing to demand.

> I think it was Walter Kaufman

I have respect for Walter Kaufman.  He understood well the writing of Nietzsche.  I
will post more on this later.

> that said that Nietzsche was forced to write
> aphorism because he was subject to terrible headaches that prevented him
> from concentrating on writing long sentences and connecting them together
> into long paragraphs; and assembling them all into long treatises...

This became true after some time, yes.  It was not always so.  He wrote long works.

> I want
> to get to the point. You can turn on the radio and record all the static,
> and record everything else in the room, even your own theories on everything
> so that you have accumulated a roomful of helpful theories on everything
> from A to Z and from n-dimensions, to z-dimensions, and then offer it to a
> publisher, but in the end there is no way that you can monitor if the
> results were successful or not &  changing for the better the world, or even
> if anyone took real notice.
>
> That is what F. Nietsche represents to me.

Then, this is what he represents to you.  I think that this is somewhat of a pity
for you because, Nietzsche, if read in the proper way, is a very beneficial
philosopher.  I think that what he imparts more than anything else is the reminder
that all is not what it seems; that one need not take things at face value; that
there are things in the mind that exist in as much a reality as things exist in the
empirical world; that there is consciousness that is not based upon what can be
discerned through the senses; that there is an infinite universe; that there is
such a thing as human will though it is very limited.

This is a valuable awareness.

This is not static. This is the basis of what runs through all of his mature
works.  It is a mistake to read Nietzsche with the hope of finding fact.  For that
purpose, I think that reading of a more scientific nature may be in order.  But for
an understanding of the sheer beauty of a human mind with all of its intricacies,
there is no finer writer than Nietzsche.


> A roomful of helpful theories.
> And we have more than one room of helpful theories, we have cities of
> apartments with roomfuls of published & helpful theories, and outside the
> cities there are still buried piles of cunieform tablets with helpful
> theories, and in araimic as well, notably authorized by Darius himself, who
> insisted that God was completely nameless - I am not sure if he put to death
> any who attempted to name God - he was an early devotee of Ahura mazda, the
> nameless one, and was probably converted to the nameless by Zoroaster, and
> this is also only a theory because some speculate that Zoroaster lived 6000
> years ago not during the time of Darius who tried to conquer ancient Greece
> but was stopped in Philleponnes [sic].
>

I am an athiest.  Therefore, I understand God better than any religionist.  There
is no theory beyond this.

> What a contradiction. What are we going to do with all these academics in
> university? Maybe we can be like the Tupac Amaru, put them to work digging
> spuds? and milking goats or spinning wool?

I do not care for academics.  However, it is of no consequence to me how they make
their living.  They may teach in universities or they may dig spuds.  The only
matter of consequence to me is that I have the mind to understand what can be
understood and the voice to express that understanding.  I was not placed upon this
earth in order to memorize data for the purpose of spouting it off haphazardly and
before an audience whose only concern is in collection of data.

Unlike Ariosto,  I have no desire to become a fool.

There is something that is quite noble in the human creature that can only be
brought out through philosophy and the writing of philosophy.  It is the nobility
of a single flame that can reach out over an eternity; or a lifetime; or a way; a
path that, from the point of its inception, cannot be broken.


> Maybe we should stop buying their
> books and make a statement.

I do not buy their books.  I do not  read their books.

> Maybe we should start buying books from those
> who flunk entrance exams, or the autodidacts? Maybe we can ask them to teach
> a child to read or plant a tree in Haiti or Bolivia on during their
> sabbaticals to recover all those - ahem - lost funds spent on keeping the
> lights in those halls of academia. Now they are genetically engineering new
> species some of those helpful and positive theories before they even hire
> more academics to study the effects of GE organisms on human health and the
> health of diverse ecosystems. Geez. It goes from bad to worst each and every
> day. There are many books now being published on the ethics of the very
> thing I bring up. You would not be able to read them all in one year let
> alone in 10 years. It is absurd to say the least. One academic trying to
> grow more food and while another  is trying to prevent the worst
> consequences possible that result from the new applied theoretical molecular
> genetics to the growing of corn. Can you imagine. Corn that has genetically
> been altered to produce a pesticide made by a bacteria only known from the
> soil, a corn that is resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, and a corn that
> cannot produce seed. Each advance in Science here creates new controversy
> and risk. Like what is going to happen now in the corn belt when the monarch
> butterflies migrate north. They are all going to be poisoned eating the
> pollen off the corn tassels. There will be no food for the insectivorous
> birds that migrate north.
>
> Of course the academic has failed. There is no consensus, just a jostling
> sound coming out universities, research centers, and the sound of a lot of
> paper shuffling and clearing of throats.

I think that this is a pity because I think that there was a time when universities
were in the business of enrichment.  Now, it is only a matter of jobs for jobs.
One may as well work for Kmart.


There is  disagreement,  confusion, babbling and quibbling over mere details. I
have read so much commentary on

> Hiedegger that I have come to the conclusion that no one can make any sense
> of what Martin is actually saying:

Ariosto considers that Heidegger is below me and that my pea brain will burst from
my very attempt to read and to understand him.  I had the volumes of his work and I
gave them away because they seemed to be not much more than Kant.  Intellectual
ravings.

> like I said there are now roomfuls of
> helpful theories on how to interpret Heidegger; there is an entire room of
> helpful theories devoted to his involvement with the Nazi's. What what good
> is that? Why be concerned about only one man that was probably crapping his
> pants in his academic setting. Of course he was scared. The smart ones left:
> Einstein, Jung, etc., long before.
>
> But really your point is a very good one. How many ancient rainforest trees
> are going to be sacrificed for more theories? I like Socrates a lot.

I also admire Socrates.

> He
> never published a word in his life.

He was a very wise man.

> Plato was a wierdo [with some -well
> helpful theories of his own to boot] , and I agree with Nietzsche on that.
>
> soft fluffy cloud

I do not understand this soft fluffy cloud business.  It is not a measure of honor.

Faizi





   

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