Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 19:08:23 -0500
From: albright-AT-world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
Subject: Heroes and Sleepers...


Evan Leeson brings up some interesting points. Certainly the tension
that... never goes away... is something on which I think Derrida seized,
and we can feel it in pre-Socratic works such as Heraclitus and
Anaximander.

I wonder, though, if people still *get* either Nietzsche or Jesus, or... so
many others. Nietzsche, from my understanding, was deeply suspicious of
these things called "words", which is perhaps why he liked Emerson so much.
For me, the greatest Emerson essay on the elliptical nature of things, how
they can be misread so easily, slip, are moving themselves, etc., is
perhaps the "Circles" essay.

And, yes, the Herd corresponds to Emerson's complaint about "how many REAL
individuals are there, among us today?"

And, yes Nietzsche, as Evan has pointed out in "The greatest danger" (76,
in Book Two) of _The Gay Science_, warns himself about the excesses of mere
Dionysian.

Evan also writes:
>Nietzsche only grudgingly
>acknowledges the necessity of something like a commonweal.

And this strikes a familiar chord for me, because I believe it was after
World War II that someone in Parliament, United (now Dissolving?) Kingdom,
said something of the same thing: basically, that of the options, democracy
is the best we have. Certainly some idea of *republic*, however, which
guarantees rights to minorities to not be oppressed by majority, needs to
be considered, which is why I brought up the ACLU in the States.

As far as Nietzsche's hero-worship thing-- hey, I'm an anarchist at heart,
but I see it happening over and over again. People want it. Be if John
Kennedy in his time (at least he got the Peace Corps going, as clumsy as it
was at first?), or Princess Diana (better to be out there, talking about
the danger of land-mines than just... sitting in a palace and letting
others eat cake?)... I see this need. So the question is: who am I going to
follow, personally? Myself. But... others? Well... all I can say is that
Gandhi is a better role model than Hitler.

As far as Nietzsche's wariness of "the herd", that is something I share.
But what do you make of his "Of the Friend" in _Thus Spoke..._? Why are
women "not yet capable of friendship"? Do you buy that? Is that his problem
or... something you share? Is he talking on a... higher level, and maybe we
should just... be happy that women can't be friends?

More on this "herd" stuff-- because I want to make sure that the SuperMan
remembers that he is really just an Ape who has worked himself up to this
higher state-- and I think it's important to understand why people like
Albert Camus knew that Nietzsche himself knew that he had a dark side, but
that Camus was fighting, in _The Plague_, to HELP people, not to murder
them, despite overwhelming odds at times--

"Of the Chairs of Virtue" in _Thus Spoke..._: Zarathustra listens to a wise
man that tells us to honour sleep and modesty before it. "Sleeping is no
mean art..." etc. What's that all about? Maybe some of those people in the
herd are asleep, or maybe they're awake, and... who are we to judge?

---Randall Albright




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