File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2000/nietzsche.0003, message 9


From: "Evan A. Leeson" <evan-AT-monsterchops.com>
Subject: Re: Nietzsche was an optimist
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:12:48 -0800


Paul

Seeing the necessity in things is not indifference. Understanding the
essence of a relationship and the strife that emerges from it - and seeing
it as necessary - is not the same as engaging in evaluation. I think of Marx
and the class struggle. Certainly he did not see as good the strife born out
the dialectic, yet it is necessary in his thinking as it is the unfolding of
history. Nietzsche saw in the coming years a time of great strife and war.
He saw the Nazis in the form of his sister's husband and others of his ilk.
He spoke very clearly and loudly against them. This was an evaluation. But
he also saw and accepted the necessity of the strife and horror to come.

Also, to look back and hate the Nazis, to hate the claimants to the throne
of Nazidom...what use is that? Hate is nothing more than a manifestation of
ressentiment. Hate is the puss oozing from a wound one cannot lick. I think
of the following passage from Nietzsche's work, but others, such as Christ,
have expressed similar sentiments:

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and
victories and by the highest development of a military order and
intelligence, and accustomed to making the heaviest sacrifices for these
things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We will break the sword" and
will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations.
Rendering itself unarmed when it has been the best armed, out of a height of
feeling - that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace
of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all
countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither onself nor
one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down
arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish make oneself
hated and feared - this must some day become the highest maxim for every
single commonwealth, too. (S, 284)

I do not accept your feint regarding normative claims. You claim very
clearly there are reasons to hate Nietzsche the man for the weaknesses in
his writing and thought that allow for misinterpretaion. I reject the claim,
as do many others, on a number of bases. And I reject hate, necessary as it
may be to these times.

Evan



----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Bryant <levi_bryant-AT-yahoo.com>
To: <nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 7:54 PM
Subject: Re: Nietzsche was an optimist


> Evan--
>
> You make excellent points...  Hating Nietzsche is
> precisely one of the dangers of his work, one of the
> consequences that can follow from reading him, one of
> the dangers involved in fiercly engaging with him.
> This danger is one that emerges when one travels with
> any thinker and attempts to think with him on an
> intimate level.  However, keep in mind that I made no
> normative claims.  I suggested that there are
> reasons... I never suggested that we "ought" to hate
> Nietzsche.  Nevertheless, I do think that it's
> tremendously important to always keep in mind the
> power that Nietzsche can exert and the manner in which
> he can be appropriated.  Perhaps appropriations of
> Nietzsche should themselves be strategic, willing that
> certain forms of life become impossible, willing only
> that which is able to say yes.  Is an affirmation so
> strong that it cannot reject any form of life that
> cannot affirm reactive?  Is it possible for a
> resounding and affirmative NO to all that is reactive
> to arise out of affirmation itself?  There are some
> things, like the Nazi's, that we cannot remain
> indifferent to...  And I do not at all think this is
> reactive, but itself born out of a love of the active.
> How can indifference be anything more than a
> nihilistic resignation?  If affirmation is to be
> anything, then it must be affirmation of what is
> affirmative in being, of what we can will to return
> eternally.  It is not the sort of affirmation one
> finds in "beautiful souls" that believes all
> differences to be federative and harmonious, and is
> thus unable to select among any of them.
>
> Paul
> --- "Evan A. Leeson" <evan-AT-monsterchops.com> wrote:
> >
> > The type manifesting in Paul Bryant wrote
> >
> > >There is ample reason here to
> > > detest Nietzscheans, and perhaps even Nietzsche
> > > himself for rendering such slavish appropriations
> > > possible.
> >
> > I gather from this we are to detest - to hate, to
> > loathe - Nietzsche for the
> > 'dangers inherent' in his works. Why would I want to
> > spend any time doing
> > this? Do we want exact some revenge from the ghost
> > of Nietzsche for the
> > horrors of the camps, or perhaps just for the way
> > the Objectivist Society on
> > campus keeps pitting Nietzsche against Rand. Do we
> > reach a point where we
> > have loathed enough, hated sufficiently that we may
> > then move on to dwell
> > solely on the beneficial insight of his work? Do we
> > hate adequately, and
> > keep an accounting of that hating, so we may answer
> > when confronted with the
> > perenial 'what about the Nazis' question that we
> > have hated Nietzsche 146
> > units of hate and have thus expelled any culpability
> > or complicity? Is this
> > loathing a distilling process? Or is it an
> > Augustinian device preventing
> > erection of too much yes-saying in the world?
> >
> > Perhaps I have misunderstood you. Perhaps I have
> > mistakenly labelled you
> > reactive, and you are actually quite different,
> > really after something else
> > when you say we should detest Nietzsche. It may be
> > that, like Hitler
> > strutting with Nietzsche's own walking stick, I have
> > misinterpreted you and
> > have used your words for some unintended purpose.
> > For my error think I shall
> > detest...you.
> >
> >
> > For the New Year - I still live, I still think: I
> > still have to live for I
> > still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo
> > sum. Today everybody
> > permits himself the expression of his wish and his
> > dearest thought: hence I,
> > too, shall say what it is to run across my heart
> > this year - what thought
> > shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness
> > of my life henceforth. I
> > want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what
> > is necessary in things;
> > then I shall be one of those who make things
> > beautiful. Amor fati: let that
> > be my love henceforth! I do not want to accuse; I do
> > not even want to accuse
> > those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only
> > negation. And all in all and
> > on the whole: some day I wish to be a Yes-sayer.
> >
> > GS 276
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> > ---
> >
> >
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
> http://im.yahoo.com
>
>
> --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>



	--- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005