File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1995/nietzsche_Aug.95, message 27


Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 20:56:41 -0700
From: callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com (Steven E. Callihan)
Subject: Re: athiesm


On Thu, 10 Aug 1995 Erik D Lindberg wrote:

>Throughout his Genealogy, Nietzsche ironically includes himself in the
>descriptions of negativity, ressentiment, and asceticism.  What he has
>won, through writing "such good books" is not, as the Deleuzian reading
>would have it, a "yea saying" affirmative posture.  Rather he wins a
>recognition of the ethos under which and with which he must struggle.
>Nietzsche escaping resentment?  He was certainly one of the most
>resentful people of his age, that self-vivisectionist, that nut-cracking,
>self-violating latter day dialectician.  Hardly free from ascetic rancor,
>he revels in what had, he thought, remained hidden in his predecessors.
>Does Nietzsche not come up with this description of ressentiment by
>looking at his own nasty reflection?

Of course, the oldest rhetorical trick in the world is to throw
back the accusation onto the accuser, as though finding the
accuser guilty of his own worst sin, if you will, somehow cancels
out the accusation, as such.  Yes, Nietzsche was ironical, but
that does not mean that he was equivocal, quite the contrary.
True, Nietzsche _does_ implicate himself relative to decadence,
nihilism, the ascetic ideal, et al, but this hardly qualifies as
an admission, if you will, that these things don't really matter
or that he is simply doing self-cancelling somersaults over
himself for the heck of it.  Rather, it is part and parcel of
Nietzsche's perspective that these subjects cannot be adequately
approached from the point of view of a merely either/or, or
dualistic, rationalism.  A complex, multi-level phenomenon,
containing many twists and turns, cannot be boiled down to a
simple Tweedledee/Tweedledum opposition.  To unravel the
dialectic, a counter-dialectic must be applied.

To Chris, to which the above was a reply, it seems to me that the
issue you raise relative to Nietzsche's stance on "representation
(non-contradiction specifically)" cannot be separated from
Nietzsche's ironical style, if you will.  If "Nietzsche, and
other atheists like Sade and Bataille, are ready to destroy not
only God and religion but the human system of representation in
which thought has for so long been entrenched," how are they to
go about it, in a self-consistent manner, other than ironically
(and quite frankly, I find Sade's _Philosophy in the Bedroom_ to
be absolutely hilarious exactly because it is so fucking
ironical).  Finally, it is important not to confuse Nietzsche's
irony with that of Socrates.  Socratic irony involves a feigned
ignorance, a pretending to know less and be more of a simpleton
than is actually the case, in order to catch out one's opponent
and trap him, while evading being pinned down oneself.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, delights in assuming what, on the
surface, seem like untenable positions, allowing us, if you will,
to seemingly pin him down, while eluding, on deeper analysis,
interpretations which would otherwise be all too easy to arrive
at due to otherwise unthought-out assumptions.  The "literalist"
interpreter of Nietzsche can never hope to come to terms with
that in Nietzsche virtually every word _is_ a question mark,
every statement a problem.  One cannot assume that even the most
basic concepts have in Nietzsche's mind the same meaning as in
our own.  (And yet NIetzsche is a thousand times more lucid than
Heidegger.)  Rather, we are confronted by what Nietzsche referred
to, somewhat cryptically, as a "pathos of distance."  Which
doesn't mean, underneath it all, that Nietzsche does not have
actual, real positions, but not ones, generally, which may be
gathered up the way one might pick up pebbles off a beach, nor
ones, for that matter, which may be easily rendered to fit and
conform to political or ideological categories which Nietzsche
would just as soon confound as countenance.  Nor, for that
matter, positions we might hope to fully fathom unless we are
"akin" to him.  Indeed, I feel Nietzsche's position here ala
"representation" cannot be stated in a non-ironical fashion
without doing some degree of violence to it, as I can't help but feel
Nietzsche full well knew, or why else would he have continued to
insist, always, that his thinking could not be effectively
separated from his "style."  One cannot use language to confute
language, logic to confute logic, _except_ that one does it in
full irony.

Heidegger, on the other hand, has to be faulted here for his
almost complete lack of irony (in this sense he _is_ a great deal
more of a _mystic_, something which Nietzsche only is _as_ an
irony).  In this sense he keeps continuously stepping into his
own trap, if you will.  Ultimately, he seems to me to be what
Thomas Mann referred to in "The Magic Mountain" as a
_flatlander_.  While he loves the depth of the forest as a
metaphor, he assiduously avoids the "heights."  Of course, to a
"flatlander" such a thorough going ironist like Nietzsche could
only be seen as thoroughly sacrilegious and irreverent, or at
worse, a clown and caricature of himself.  This however, I can't
help but feel, is a case of Heidegger falling victim to the
prototypical short-coming of the forest-dweller and flatlander--
his _myopia_.

I would agree that Nietzsche does assume the "radical" position
you ascribe to him, involving "the dissolution of the categories
of representation and identity," but not in any sense in the form
of "let's let everything just disappear," shall we say, but
rather to highlight that the entire corpus of thinking (and along
with it all our concepts of the true, the real, etc.) is
underlaid and supported not by some kind of, ultimately,
metaphysical authority (being, nature, whatnot), but by a
particular and peculiar "happenstance," forming our "species
perspective," at best, if you will, which is present to us only
in the form of an open field of metaphorical associations, say,
rather than some kind of closed system of self-confirming
concepts.  In other words, if grammar may be said to confirm
"being," it doesn't therefore follow that "being" may in any
sense be said to confirm grammar.  Thus grammar is no grounds for
believing in "being," and so on.  Does that make sense?
==============================================================================            Steven E. Callihan -- callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com

             "With a creative hand they reach for the future,
           and all that is and has been becomes a means for them,
                        an instrument, a hammer."

         --Friedrich Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil," Section 211.
==============================================================================


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