week2_pedlt3

MEANDERINGS OF A CONFUSED READER…

ON GREEDY LOVERS “Love also has to be learned,” Nietzche says, and it takes patience and gentleness with “the unfamiliar” before it are compsenates ‘us’ by the throwing off of “its veil and presenting itself to us as a new, ineffable beauty” (334). There are some gendered tropes hiding behind this wooing and unveiling, although the passage refered most directly to a love of music and a love of self in its movement towards “everything that we love.”

Yet most of the action and power here seems to take place on the part of what is loved--"it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers"--and what is loved is particular and personal--"who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it." In a fragment less charitable to love, Nietzsche posits that the difference between love and avarice is perspectival--to those that have, it looks like a dangerous covetousness, but to the have-nots, it is love--and masculine possessiveness underlies both (14). In one of the many mysogynist passages in the text, Nietzche declares that:

A woman's passion in its unconditional renunciation of rights of her own presupposes precisely that on the other side there is no equal pathos, no equal will to renunciation; for if both partners felt impelled by love to renounce themselves, we should then get — I do not know what; perhaps an empty space? (363)

But if "desiring nothing better from the world" than a (feminine / feminized) lover is not renunciation and pathos, I'm not quite sure what is, and if love must be learned, then it is quite strange that this gendered love is, according to Nietzsche, a "natural opposition" that no "social contract" or will can change, despite its acknowledged injustice. Must love involve a dialectic of renunciation and possession, and (if so) must this dialectic define the essences of the lover's dyad? (I don't think so.) Why doesn't he considered the other obvious alternative--both partner impelled by love to possess each other--let alone possibilities that could be derived from property metaphors (as icky as they all are), such as a love co-operative?

Through all the ickiness, there is some little seed in the 'unveiling' described in 'learning how to love' that seems a little less than loathsome: Cultivating / learning love - It is not something that strikes like an arrow out of the sky. Rather, it is something that is the result of a process, it has a history, and is not mere instinct. Love as a process of revelation and familiarization - It involves an 'other'--even the other in/of ourselves--becoming an 'we' (or 'I'), and this entails an intimacy that is a form of knowledge (although perhaps not 'truth' in the sense used below).

ON UNVEILING BACON In the preface, Nietzsche derides the desire of "Egyptian youths" to embrace and unveil statues--an allusion to a statue of Isis bearing the inscription "I am everything that is, that was, that will be, and no mortal has raised my veil" (pg. 8). The difference, perhaps, in the unveiling that is the "reward" for a love slowly learned is particular and involves at least some agency on the part of the finally familiar beloved, while the "youthful madness in the love of truth"--is too public, universalizing, and appropriative? "We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil," Nietzsche notes, and this futility of youthful truth-madness is quite opposed to the "new, ineffable beauty" earned by a love learned. To pull off a veil and expect a preexisting truth to be waiting is to forget that such forceful interventions are both revelatory and creative--cultivating a love that is an intimate knowledge acknowledes the intervention and the mutual relations involved (at least in our nicer, reformed version).

These "youths" vaguely reminds me of Francis Bacon's understanding of nature according to Merchant, Harding, and other feminists in the "Bacon debates:"

--please forgive the long block quote--

The confined, controlled experiment that could be witnessed, replicated, and validated by a multitude of observers replaced the individualistic, arcane secrets known only to the magus, the astrologer,and the witch. That new method, I argue in what follows, was rooted, at least in part, in gendered interconnections between the secrets of nature and the secrets of women and in new forms of knowledge extracted from female nature and the female body. By reforming the secrets tradition, the private secrets held by both nature and women could be revealed. The anatomy of nature and the anatomy of the body could be exposed for the benefitof humankind. It is out of the genre of the "secrets of nature"that Bacon formulated significant aspects of his experimental philosophy. […] The material and the visual combined to produce power over nature. "By art and the hand of man," Bacon stated, nature can be "forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded" into revealing her hidden secrets. "Under the mechanical arts," he wrote, "nature betrays her secrets more fully . . . than when in enjoyment of her natural liberty."Technological discoveries "help us to think about the secrets still locked in nature's bosom." "They do not, like the old, merely exert a gentle guidance over nature's course; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations." Bacon's new method was part of an emerging framework of science, technology, capitalist development, and Christian religion that provided hope for the recovery of humanity's dominion over nature lost in the Fall from Eden.

(Merchant 2008 151, 162)

Nietzsche is just as guilty of sexist metaphors and arguments. But when do the natural sciences look more like Bacon's "subduing" nature and when does it look more like "a new, ineffable beauty” revealed by a cultivated intimacy? Are these two things almost always wrapped up together?

Maybe this will help:

**57. To the Realists --** You sober beings, who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy, and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, you call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you ; before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it, oh, you dear images of Sais! But are not you also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamoured artist? And what is " reality " to an enamoured artist! you still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of "reality," for example oh, that is an old, primitive " love "! In every feeling, in every sense impression, there is a portion of this old love: and similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else has become mingled and woven into it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What is "real" in them? Remove the phantasm and the whole human element from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your origin, your past, your preparatory schooling, your whole history as man and beast! There is no "reality" for us nor for you either, you sober ones, we are far from being so alien to one another as you suppose ; and perhaps our good will to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2001. //The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs//. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 2008. “Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited.” //Journal of the History of Ideas// 69 (1) (January 1): 147–162. doi:10.2307/30139672.