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. ============================================================================== --- from list nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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