File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_1998/nietzsche.9811, message 56


Date: 	Tue, 3 Nov 1998 22:53:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Ingram <jwingram-AT-email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: Greco-Roman Gods and the slave rebellion




On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Dan Dzenkowski wrote:
 
> Interesting on how you relate conscience and bad conscience.  It is not good
> and bad, but just conscience and bad conscience.  

Even bad conscience was productive; we could not have surpassed the
ascetic ideal without having had to work against it (not that we have yet
surpassed it, not all of us).  Specifically, Nietzsche lays out social
life and conscience as troublesome benefits.  Judith Butler notes that
"Nietzsche attributes a creative or formative power to conscience, and the
act of turning back upon oneself is not only the condition of the
posibility of the subject, but the condition of the possibility of
fiction, fabrication, and transfiguration" (_The Psychic Life of Power_
69).  That is critical for _enabling_ the will.  The danger is that of
taking joy in inflicting suffering on ourself; you have spoken of the
benefits.  
	Another danger is falling prey to resentment in indicting
asceticism.  Looking to the opportunities provided by the priests of the
ascetic ideal can help to avoid this.  Otherwise, we spout venom against
the poisoners . . . 

  
>         I don't think that 'we' have killed god.  Read Zarathustra, there is
> no 'we' but  a diseased man who killed god.  
Specificity matters a great deal for context: The madman asks in the Gay
Science, "'Whither is God?. . . I will tell you.  _We have killed him_ --
you and I.  All of us are his murderers'" (aph 125).  It is just that some
of us, according to the madman, do not know that yet.


> Your idea of a genealogical approach seems to
> me to want to salvage some 'knowledge' that we have gained from
> Christianity, but maybe don't realize yet.  Nietzsche wanted to throw it all
> away

He did not want to throw it all away.  That would represent the domination
of a one-sided view of history above the other possibilities.  In the
"Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" he argues that forgetting is
necessary to act, but that remembering is necessary to be more than an
animal.  He recognizes that critical history has value, but that
monumental and antiquarian history also has value.  Reading him as saying
that only one approach is called for ignores these important moments in
his texts.


> This health assumes
> innate knowledge of the health of your own spirit.  

That spirit was produced as interiority by Christianity.  Are we to give
it up, or to overcome the ascetic remnants?  

> Your genealogical
> approach seems to me to say that we should keep some of the sickness around
> from Christianity, since it was not all that bad, some of it can still be of
> use. 

This is a poor reading of my argument.  We should dispense with the
sickness, but part of that process is resisting the will to truth as
articulated through the ascetic ideal.  Stating that historical "forces,"
to veer towards Hegel, have but one value (e.g. Christianity is "bad")
falls into the epistemology Nietzsche inveighs against.  Genealogy calls
for specificity in assessment.  Blanket condemnations such as those you
"vehemently" support are one-sided; we should also consider that
"Nietzsche admits that the ascetic ideal 'saved the will' and transformed
man into an 'interesting animal,' 'pregnant with a future.'  Under the
aegis of the ascetic ideal, we have learned to experiment with ourselves
and to exploit the plasticity of the human soul.  Nietzsche thus sees in
the power of the ascetic ideal the sole promise of our future: Now that we
know what the ascetic ideal can do, he hpes to harness its power for less
destructive ends" (Daniel Conway in _The Politics of Irony: Essays in
Self-Betrayal_, 86-7).

Blanket condemnations of the past risk turning away from the abyssal
ground of Dionysian hope towards a starry optimism.



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