Subject: Re: obeying
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 10:06:35 -0400


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Dear List,

It's hard reading Nietzcshe since the perspective always changes. No doubt there is an emphasis on a sort of blocking-up of energy, a reserved reticence that withdraws into the shadows and yet there is an expenditure of energy, an explosive expulsion of plenitude. This a 'contradiction' that is interesting for me since it's the element in which I think while putting the emphasis on reticence. In the _Twilight of The Idols_  in "Expeditions of an Untimely Man" section 8 he says that for art to exist there needs to be a physiological condition that he describes as an intoxicating agitation whose essence is a "feeling of plenitude and increased energy", and, moving on to the next section, "In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power -- until they are reflections of his perfection. This *compulsion* to transform into the perfect is -- art." He goes on to say that an anti-artistic instinct would make everything consumptive, lean and needy so to speak. So art in Nietzsche's sense does interrupt a consumptive principle of pleasure and is the expression of a fecund desire that flows and overflows... He is insists in thinking of this as a heroic warrior type that represents the true Hellenes prior to the decadence of Socrates. His taste is for martial heroic epics of the kind represented by Ceaser or Napoleon. Very different attitude from that expressed by Propertius and his model Callimachus of the Alexandrian school of poetry that puts emphasis on an excessive approach to self-restraint and questions martial heroic epic poetry. I don't think he understood self-restraint very well even when he works with it everywhere. If he did he wouldn't not have cared for the heroic warrior type or maybe his temperament is different than mine. In _The Gay Science_ section 318 he seems to respond to Propertius when in a description of two kinds of response to pain he writes: "In pain I hear the captain's command: "Take in the sails!" The bold seafarer "man" must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, and the ocean would swallow him. We must learn to live with diminished energies, too: As soon as pain gives safety signal the time has come to diminish them; some great danger or other, a storm is approaching, and we are well advised to "inflate" ourselves as little as possible". The other reponse to pain would be the heroic type whose expression "is never prouder, more warlike, and happier that it is when a storm comes up; indeed, pain itself gives then their greatest moments". He takes the former response as a search for comfort, happiness and pleasure which are aims he questions. This is not how I take the lowering of sails to work since while being a gathering withdrawal it is also a separation, a cutting away of consumptive desire and that means pain as well as a reticent expression of plenitude that flows and overflows... If one can speak of joy as a result then the most proper expression would insist on an oxymoron such as tortuous joy, sweet drowning... on the open seas... Niezsche never got a chance to work out his thoughts into maturity but if he would have his language would have been more prone to using oxymorons and a more tortuous blending of preservation and expulsion, or of uncreativity and creation and not wild and noisy contradictory swings. Then this erotic rhythm of life would have really had a lightness to it and been able to dance with a star.

Gulio

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