File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9803, message 160


From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 22:48:57 -0500
Subject: The invariable fate of critical thought


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DOING HARM TO STUPIDITY (1)

1- The invariable fate of critical thought

It is a comical fate which the thought of critical philosophers
undergoes.  In the beginning, there is rejection, when not an outright
effort at repression, of any publicization.  But since all codes are
leaky, soon enough - often after their death - one finds the formation
of congregations around the damned texts, around their interpretation. 
Then it is a golden rush to hermeneutics, on the right and on the left,
usually accompanied by a thorough dose of falsification of the texts
themselves.  

Shortly thereafter, one of the congregations becomes a church with
universalistic aspirations, and the thought of the philosopher - even
when it might well have constituted an anti-philosophy - is enshrined by
an overcode, providing the only legal interpretation of the texts.  If
the original thought formed an open system, it now becomes closed - and
closure is thereby sought for any outstanding controversies.   Gathered
around a dead text wrapping the mummy of the philosopher, believers seek
their identity.  And finally, sometime after the inevitable failure of
the ecclesiastic systematization, the residues are left to the hyenas,
the carrion, the curious, the bookworms and the exegeticists.

One might idly suppose that such fate parallels the course of life. 
Yet, all it parallels is the recourse to survival - with the endless
compromises that must be made to neutralize, 'atavicize', banalize,
reduce and disinfect the power of the original thought.  What survives
of the original impulse is a cadaveric appearance, a deformed parody of
the philosopher's expression: the commonplaces, the easy
interpretations, the Campbell-soup version for edentulous puppies.  That
is the exchange value corresponding to the wide dissemination of a
label, the price to convert the mediocre to any church.  


Lambda C


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