Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 21:57:53 -0230 (NDT)
From: Daniel James Arthur Tarte <h53djat-AT-morgan.ucs.mun.ca>
Subject: Nihilism (Part 2)



Steve Callihan wrote:

Perspectivism is not put forward as some kind of counter-absolute. Quite 
the contrary. Rather, perspectivism acknowledges the possibility that the
metaphysical (non-perspectival) may be true, but merely asserts that, all
the same, we can never know such a non-perspectival truth (or truths). The
question, for us, is meaningless, in other words. Thus, perspectivism does
not exclude the possibility that the metaphysical may be true, but only
brackets it, if you will, as an imponderable.
_____

DT: That sounds a little too Kantian too me. What matters is what we can
know and what we can do, and keeping ourselves open to the possible 
branches and circuits that such knowledge and action may lead us into.
Outside of this, imagination can convey to us ANY possiblity; dogmatic 
Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, etc) simply has the advantage in 
this regard of being an historical and cultural and social entity. Its 
force, so to speak, resides not in any internal coherence, but in its 
omnipresence and in its developed and transmissable valuations. No doubt,
there are 'other worlds', perhaps even an absolute infinity of them; but 
only what is autochthonous for us can provide us guidance and orientation.
This means that what Christianity has to teach us is not a truth that must
be countered; rather, it informs us of certain tendencies and features of
the human animal. Primarily, its capacity to paradoxically give over it 
desires to a law of its own making.   
_____
 
>what N seemed to mean by the undergoing was the historical and cultural
>transition from the old standpoint to the new standpoint. Here, 
>'transvaluation' signifies the affirmation of truth as the 'normalizing'
>processes whereby organisms (including humans) dynamically contend with
>the environs that enfold them. In other words, truth as a process of
>becoming, and not as an external, autonomous and continuously
>self-identical 'good'.

This is to say that Nietzsche simply flip-flops the traditional basis for
valuation. I understand that this is Heidegger's position, that 
Nietzsche's thinking amounts to a reversed Platonism. I, however, don't
see in Nietzsche's writing, other than possibly in his earlier phases 
(Birth of Tragedy & Untimely Meditations), where he asserts as an 
affirmative truth, if you will, any such thing as "the 'normalizing' 
processes whereby organisms (including humans) dynamically contend with
the environs that enfold them." In his post-romantic (post-Schopenhauer)
phases, he goes out of his way to deny this.
_____

DT: I believe that the 'break' between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche has more
to do with Nietzsche coming to the realization that Schopenhauer did not 
go far enough with his conception of Life as an indifferent and 
qualitatively differentiating power; he reverted back to a conception of
this force as one that we ought to resign ourselves to through a passive
dissolution of personality into a blank One. The break involves not a 
disagreement over the will, but over what the will signifies; becoming as 
a phenenomenon in its own right, with its own intrinsic 'positivity', and
no longer judged from the artificial, abstract and reactive standpoint of
identity and constancy. Nietzsche's 'History of an Error' makes this 
clear: even the current trend of his own day (ie. Positivism and 
Naturalism) is motivated by defining itself as non-metaphysical, non-
theological, etc. Thus it continues to elaborate and explore existence 
in response to the misguided forms of thinking it pretends to have 
overcome. Is Heidegger correct to explain Nietzsche's thinking as a 
reversal of Platonism? I'm not sure. He certainly isn't thereby 
identifying it with Postivism or Naturalism. It is nothing so simple (this
also applies to Deleuze's difficult rendering of the meaning of the 
reversal in Nietzsche); 'reversal' for Heidegger seems to involve not a
rendering of becoming opposed to static being, but rather a historical 
movement of thinking that finishes the potential for thinking inherent in
the primordial presupposition that being may be derived from entities.
Plato sees the basis of entities (ie. the Good and the forms it 
maintains) as the that which every entity strives for or at the very least 
has an informing dependenct upon; Nietzsche on the other hand argues that
it is the striving itself that is basic, and that any 'basis', as the
contemporary composition of a being, is only useful to the extent that it 
can promote further becomings capable of expanding that being's power
(power would mean weakness; a capacity to be more, of not being capable 
enough: assurance, confidence, grace; not stemming from the self-
satisfaction of being complete, but rather in the face of the fear and
anxiety that automatically arises during any transformative act, 
during any passage through difference that shall call into question
what one 'is'). This is the reversal (see "The Will to Power as Art"),
but it is more a final outcome of the metaphysical orientation toward
the ontological difference. 
	I'm not interested in the issue of whether or not Heidegger is 
'faithful' to Nietzsche. That is irrelevent to the issue of the meaning
of what he himself is trying to say. There is no good reason why someone
cannot take Nietzsche as Nietzsche AND Heidegger as Heidegger (including
the latter's 'distortion' of Nietzsche). Thinkers are not monuments 
requiring preservation: they are shots in the dark that ought to 
inspire us and possibly guide us as WE make OUR own way into the night.
This may also entail perverting the spirit of past meanings, but does
anyone really believe, for example, that what we understand by 
Christianity today has anything at all to do with what that Hebrew rebel
and his cohorts were actually thinking and doing in the Imperial Roman
Province of Palestine two-thousand years ago? History is about the 
re-activation and transformation of what has been via our own 
contemporary attitudes and concerns; Jesus was doing the same thing 
in relation to his own native and inherited convictions. He saw that the
original purity and fierceness of his forefathers had declined into
a state of rote habit, ritual, bureaucracy and materialism. The appeal
to an 'original' is also a valuation; again, produced out of and at the 
service of what one is capable of in the present.    
	These are Nietzsche's concerns throughout his entire career: 
"Antichrist" is an hysterical condemnation of Christianity as a way of
thinking and as an institution that has 'infected' us with a whole
range of concepts and habits that are violently opposed to the endeavor
to attain to clarity on the fundamental issue of 'the innocence of 
becoming'. "Beyond Good & Evil" discusses at one point the intrusion
of machine-culture regulation into every sphere of human existence, so
that the demand for the emancipation of women in the industrial and 
technological Age shall see 'Woman' -as a 'weaker sex' that has been 
forced to cultivate more delicate forms of power and influence- lose Her 
historically developed talents as She transforms Herself into yet another
mediocre, labouring entity (just like the 'modern European man'). And
what about the brilliant 'Will & Wave' of "The Gay Science"? Is not the 
'secret' of the waves their ceaseless and circular commotion; taking a 
momentary stand in the fixity of a crest, before dispersing back into the 
incoherence of difference and becoming? "Thus live waves-thus live we 
who will... nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green 
lightning." 
_____

Heidegger also seems to ignore Nietzsche's identification of Platonic 
and Judeo-Christian metaphysics as, itself, being a reversal of what he 
terms as "natural values" (the value-system of Paganism, if you will). 
To say that Nietzsche advocates a re-reversal here, a reversion back to 
barbarism (to "naturalism"), is just plain wrong. Rather, Nietzsche 
dissolves the opposition here--the "unnatural values" (morality) have 
developed out of and have their source in "natural values" ("immoral" 
drives & instinct). He doesn't reflip this, in other words, but merely 
dissolves the first into the second (any morality is itself an expression
of drives that are not moral, in other words). He does the same thing with
the being/appearance pair. In every case, what Nietzsche attacks is the 
assertion of absolute oppositions (the "belief in opposites").
_____

DT: Heidegger's reversal (via Nietzsche) takes into account that between
the Ancients and us stands more than two-thousand years of metaphysics;
not as a vaporous and ineffectual mode of abstract conceptualization,
but as the the basic disposition that has essentially determined the
shape of civilization over that time-span.   




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