Tuesday 23 August 2011
Monday 1 August 2011
Thursday 30 June 2011
Is Nietzsche a nihilist?
Is Nietzsche a nihilist?
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, KSA 12:9 [60], taken from The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann
Tuesday 28 June 2011
Monday 27 June 2011
Thursday 23 June 2011
Life-denying and life-affirming
The terms life-denying or life-affirming could be understood as responses to moral terms such as good/evil. As such the terms can be applied to lots of phenomena [as can the terms good/evil]. An action, a value, a type of character or even a whole culture or political system could be termed life-denying or life-affirming. What makes these things life-denying would be the extent to which they constrain or deny the ability of the person or culture to express its will to power in a healthy way.
We can see how a living organism could be said to express its will to power, if this is understood biologically as some kind driving force or energy that distinguishes a living from a non-living thing. This interpretation has its problems [for example, how can a culture have a will to power?] but it fits with points made in the text [13, 36, 259]. An organism's will to power could be expressed in terms of the drive to exploit its surroundings in order to flourish by expending its energies; but it could also occur in more morally acceptable ways, such as a drive to artistic creativity or self-expression. What's less clear is how a Christianity can have a will to power. I guess a Christian culture could be said to irrationally or unnecessarily or unhealthily constrain the self-expression of people who live in/under it [by saying that self-interest is a sin, for example]. And if will to power is a biological term [i.e all life forms must exploit to survive], then it is also relatively clear how a situation could constrain an organism's ability to do this. Although it raises questions about how Nietzsche - or anyone - could decide what counts as genuinely life-denying and life-affirming from outside the organism's perspective. It is when he applies the distinction to psychological ways of expressing a will to power in value judgements [i.e. noble values] that it gets less clear. If the slave types expend their energies in religious worship, then for them, religion isn't life-denying. This surely fits with perspectivism - religion is the perspective of the weak willed. But we cannot make a judgement that religious belief is life-denying as such [i.e. intrinsically life-denying] because it only seems to be life-denying for those people for whom religion is a constraint on their will to power [i.e. the noble artists who shape their lives as artistic acts]. Being anti-religion is an expression of a higher way of life FOR THOSE PEOPLE but not for everyone else. So the distinction life-denying/life-affirmin
We can see how a living organism could be said to express its will to power, if this is understood biologically as some kind driving force or energy that distinguishes a living from a non-living thing. This interpretation has its problems [for example, how can a culture have a will to power?] but it fits with points made in the text [13, 36, 259]. An organism's will to power could be expressed in terms of the drive to exploit its surroundings in order to flourish by expending its energies; but it could also occur in more morally acceptable ways, such as a drive to artistic creativity or self-expression. What's less clear is how a Christianity can have a will to power. I guess a Christian culture could be said to irrationally or unnecessarily or unhealthily constrain the self-expression of people who live in/under it [by saying that self-interest is a sin, for example]. And if will to power is a biological term [i.e all life forms must exploit to survive], then it is also relatively clear how a situation could constrain an organism's ability to do this. Although it raises questions about how Nietzsche - or anyone - could decide what counts as genuinely life-denying and life-affirming from outside the organism's perspective. It is when he applies the distinction to psychological ways of expressing a will to power in value judgements [i.e. noble values] that it gets less clear. If the slave types expend their energies in religious worship, then for them, religion isn't life-denying. This surely fits with perspectivism - religion is the perspective of the weak willed. But we cannot make a judgement that religious belief is life-denying as such [i.e. intrinsically life-denying] because it only seems to be life-denying for those people for whom religion is a constraint on their will to power [i.e. the noble artists who shape their lives as artistic acts]. Being anti-religion is an expression of a higher way of life FOR THOSE PEOPLE but not for everyone else. So the distinction life-denying/life-affirmin
Bewitchment of language in Beyond Good and Evil
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses philosophers of being 'bewitched' by language. This is a serious allegation and there are a number of ways in which this is discussed in the text. One early example [found in the first few aphorisms] involves the tendency for everyone [not just philosophers, but philosophers should know better...] to structure their thinking in terms of opposed linguistic terms. Nietzsche calls this 'thinking in opposites' and seems to think it has important consequences when we try to grasp the nature of reality. As he puts it in Aphorism 2: 'The metaphysician's fundamental belief is the belief in the opposition of values'. He argues that philosophers build metaphysical systems around what are essentially linguistic oppositions, such as true/false, good/evil, altruism/egoism, appearance/reality and that these dichotomous terms inform or underpin certain types of value judgements. Given how careful most philosophers are to only make claims that can be supported or justified, it seems a very extreme claim to make. So what support does Nietzsche offer?
As ia often the case in the text, what is missing from the accusation is any real detail about how and why this occurs. We could onviously turn away at this point and draw the conclusion that Nietzsche is simply making an unsubstantiated assertion. But given the importance of the claim in the text, we need to be a little more patient and try to reconstruct what an argument in support of the claim might look like [while also recognising that Nietzsche chooses not to present such an argument himself, for reasons that we need not go into here].
As ia often the case in the text, what is missing from the accusation is any real detail about how and why this occurs. We could onviously turn away at this point and draw the conclusion that Nietzsche is simply making an unsubstantiated assertion. But given the importance of the claim in the text, we need to be a little more patient and try to reconstruct what an argument in support of the claim might look like [while also recognising that Nietzsche chooses not to present such an argument himself, for reasons that we need not go into here].
I think such an argument could look like this:
Imagine if, in trying to understand the nature of reality, a philosopher [let's call her Emmanuelle Platocartes] experiences the world as sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but constantly changing; it is therefore difficult to say what it is really like. Analysing the logic of this experience, Platocartes notices that she uses the same terms 'hot' and 'cold' to name different experiences of different degrees of warmth or coldness. 'Hot' means 'warmer than cold', for example. But what are the different experiences, experiences of? The relative terms [hot/cold] only make sense if they are grasped logically as relative to something absolute [isn't that what 'relative to' means?]. Absolute or pure hot/cold must therefore exist for our experiences of things as relatively hot/cold things to make sense.
Imagine if, in trying to understand the nature of reality, a philosopher [let's call her Emmanuelle Platocartes] experiences the world as sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but constantly changing; it is therefore difficult to say what it is really like. Analysing the logic of this experience, Platocartes notices that she uses the same terms 'hot' and 'cold' to name different experiences of different degrees of warmth or coldness. 'Hot' means 'warmer than cold', for example. But what are the different experiences, experiences of? The relative terms [hot/cold] only make sense if they are grasped logically as relative to something absolute [isn't that what 'relative to' means?]. Absolute or pure hot/cold must therefore exist for our experiences of things as relatively hot/cold things to make sense.
Armed with this insight, Platocartes is now able to apply the analytical framework to make evaluative judgements about the nature of reality in terms of the extent to which the world approaches or fails to approach some perfect or pure state. The world as we experience it ['world as it is for us'] becomes a mere appearance of some deeper reality ['world as it is in itself']. Anything that merely feels hot is judged to be not really hot, it is but a poor reflection of absolute or perfect hotness. Our experience becomes a kind of illusion. And anyone who tries to identify 'hotness in itself' with relative hotness is looked on as misrepresenting the true essence of hotness or is understood to be mistaking an imperfect, pale reflection of hotness for the real thing. So thinking in opposites has led the philosopher a long way from the world as it is actually experienced to a judgement that the world should be rejected and our experience should be mistrusted because they never measure up to perfection.
Nietzsche suggests Plato's theory of Forms is derived in this way. Christianity, he argues, also opposes body [bad] to soul [good] in this way, while Descartes distinguishes mind/reason [good] from senses/experience [bad]. Kant opposes heteronomy [bad] to autonomy [good]. Once you notice it, you can see it everywhere...
This is a problem because it leads us - disastrously - to denigrate the confused and messy world in which we actually live in the name of some perfect ideal state. It also leads us to judge ourselves in purely negative terms, a symptom of a deep nihilism that sees human beings as never able to measure up to the kind of absolute knowledge that always seems to be out of reach. In other words, thinking in opposites is life-denying.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)