File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Aug.95, message 162


Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 16:41:56 -0500 (CDT)
From: Erik D Lindberg <edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Hegel and the Nietzschean Dialectic


On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Steven E. Callihan wrote:

> Some of the issues which, for now, interest me relative to Hegel,
> Nietzsche, and the dialectic:
> 
> 1.   The whole issue of starting points, premisses, foundations,
>      grounds, etc.  Does Hegel believe he is able to nail down
>      his premisses in some manner that is other than self-
>      referential?  In this regard, what is the status of the
>      categories of reason, for instance?  Of tautology?  Does
>      Hegel use "reason," as such, as his absolute reference
>      point, and is it exactly this which Nietzsche relativizes
>      (in critiquing reason as anything but "pure")?


I'll make a stab at this one: No, it is precisely by being 
self-referential within an airtight system that Hegel thought he would 
provide grounding.  In this way he could be compared to Kant, who thought 
that one had to be perfectly clear about the limits of reason before 
beginning to think.  Hegel thought this was silly, instead suggesting 
that one became clear in the process of thinking.  Thus the importance of 
mediation, which is, to invoke a phrase from Freud, a sort of Hegelian 
"working-through, which leads one to a truth that is grounded, but only 
by way of a narrative of overcoming obstacles, reaching higher insights, 
and so on.

The poststructuralist reading of Nietzsche has him blowing apart this 
airtight system (what Derrida refers to, following Bataille, as a 
"restricted economy"), largely through his perspectivism, the will to 
power, etc..  But I think Tristan Tzara captured this sentiment pretty 
well when he wrote: "The way people have of looking hurriedly at things 
from the opposite point of view, so as to impose their opinions 
indirectly, is called dialectic, in other words, heads I win tails you 
lose, dressed up to look scholarly. . . .  Dialectics is an amusing 
machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would 
have held in any case.  Do people really think that, by the meticulous 
subtlety of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the 
accuracy of their opinions."  


> > 
> ==============================================================================>             Steven E. Callihan -- callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com
>   
>             "Most of the expressions we use are metaphorical: 
>              they contain the philosophy of our ancestors..."
> 
>                --Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, _Aphorisms_, 
>                     "Notebook D 1773-1775," No. 87
> ==============================================================================> 
> 
> 
> 	--- from list nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---
> 

Erik D. Lindberg
Dept. of English and Comparative Lit.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI  53211
email: edl-AT-csd.uwm.edu



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