Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 10:53:22 -0800
From: callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com (Steven E. Callihan)
Subject: Re: Nietzsche as Existentialist (was masks)


>You know, I'm really a little bit puzzled as to just what the self is in N,
>Sartre, Foucault or anybody else really.
>
>Is that too absurd, too elementary a question to ask?
>
>The self's relation to itself.  It shapes, criticizes, fashions,
>transcends? itself.  What is it that it can do that? That it can be two
>things at the same time, neither and both?, and still be "itself?"
>
>Can we really discard the notion of an ontology of the self "just like
>that?"  Doesn't it sort return eternally?
>
>Jorge

Some of this simply has to do with the question of groundedness, whether,
for instance, as in Sartrean existentialism, the "human" is a blank slate
upon which we may scribble what we may (whoever may get their hands on the
chalk, that is). Actually, one need not look too far to see much of the
Post-Modern position as a permutation of this earlier existentialist
assertion, minus the ethical imperative (at least the ethical imperative is
denied on the surface, although I suspect still enforced beneath the
surface, in less honest forms, in other words).  Nietzsche's notion of
_Grundtext_ in my mind, along with many other points in his thinking, would
undercut the idea of the human as simply a blank slate.

=============================================================================
            Steven E. Callihan -- callihan-AT-callihan.seanet.com

  "All things majestic are as difficult as they are rare."--Baruch Spinoza.

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