Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 14:20:34 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: Doer and the deed; formerly: Re: superWOman was here


On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Anders Ohlsson wrote:

> 
> Erik,
> 
> >This sounds suspiciously wrong.  Writes Nietzsche: "But there is no such
> >substratum; there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the
> >doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed--the deed is everything."
> 
> Taken literally, "you are what you do" by definition, but it's easy to
> interpret it as a statement of causality, as in "you are what you eat".

I'm not sure I agree.  Rather Nietzsche is interesting in relation to a 
tradition of Platonic/Christian thinking because of the way he subverts 
traditional definitions and inherited literalisms.  There are a lot of 
(non-Nieztzschean) philosophers that would say that literally and by 
definition doing and being are quite different.  What Nietzsche did, in 
effect, is deconstruct this opposition by examining it genealogically.   
I would argue, in fact, that the doer-deed statement of Nietzsche is 
decidedly working against causal explanations (see GM I,13).

Erik


> 
> /A
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 	--- 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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