LN_Nietzsche

SPAT_01 Maurice Blanchot – “The Infinite Conversation Theory…”

This week, I took to mainly transcribing and typing to putting things in and together. This is my first time really encountering Nietzsche so I wanted to absorb and am still processing…

Translations of Nietzsche as an issue::

“Nietzsche had been delivered over to lies; lies that were conscious, resolute, at times refined, and that went from the use of a free thought for anti-Semitic ends to the fabrication of a weighty mythology organized by a pseudo-religious ambition. But the “true” Nietzsche, in the guise of a mass of unpublished documents, was resting quietly in the very house where this absence of scruples and the need to show oneself off to advantage reigned,” (Blanchot 136).

“//The Will to Power// is therefore not Nietzsche’s book. It is a work fabricated by its editors and it is a false work, in the sense that what Nietzsche had written at various moments over the course of years traversed by the most diverse intentions, without order or system, is presented to us as the material of a systematic work that he had prepared and intended as such,” (Blanchot 138).

Schlechta: “Nietzsche possessed a nearly infinite capacity for precise ideas that were separate and rigorously formulable, each one of them alive in the manner of a tiny organism. The very loose unity of all these thoughts resided in the secret gathering intention that remained always present to Nietzsche alone: a hidden and tormenting presence” (138)

“One would like to recommend to writers: leave nothing behind, destroy everything you wish to see disappear; do not be weak, have confidence in no one, for you will necessarily be betrayed one day” (139)

“In Nietzsche’s work there is nothing that might be called a center. There is no central work, no Hauptwerk at all. But since what he conceives that is essential manifests itself also in what is apparently accidental, none of it can be neglected or scornfully rejected, including posthumous writings, on the pretext that they would merely give another form to thoughts already expressed” (140).

Here, then, is a first approach to nihilism: it is not an individual experience, not a philosophical doctrine, nor is it a fatal light cast over human nature, eternally destined to nothingness. Rather, nihilism is an event accomplished in history that is like a shedding of history—the moment when history turns and that is indicated by a negative trait: that values no longer have value in themselves. There is also a positive trait: for the first time the horizon is infinitely open to knowledge, "Everything is permitted." This new authorization given to man when the authority of values has collapsed means first of all: knowing everything is permitted, there is no longer a limit to man's activity. //"We have a still undiscovered// //country before us, the boundaries of which no one has seen, a beyond to all countries// // and corners of the ideal known hitherto, a world so over-rich in the beautiful, //// the strange, the questionable, the frightful." //

//“ //The thought of the eternal return remains strange in its antiquated absurdity. It represents the logical vertigo that Nietzsche himself could not escape. It is the nihilist thought par excellence, the thought by which nihilism surpasses itself absolutely by making itself definitively unsurpassable. It is therefore the most able to enlighten us as to the kind of trap that nihilism is when the mind decides to approach it head on (148).

“Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered this was: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness. It says the impotence of nothingness, the false brilliance of its victories; it tells us that when we think nothingness we are still thinking being. Nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same” (Blanchot, 149)


 * **Is the nothingness the silence that Philboni seeks out then? Was CC a nihilistic type thing, or maybe I'm reading into it too much **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">“Lukacs sees Nietzsche’s entire philosophy, then, as a psychology blown up into the myth of a personal history: the reversal of a man who was first taken hostage by contemporary decadence (the veneration for Schopenhauer and Wagner: illussions about Bismarck’s empire), who then suffered the error of his ways, and finally sought to surmount them. Nietzsche does no more than generalize his own experience – a search in sickness for health – into a philosophy of history and culture” (142).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">“Those who want science must also want the consequences of science, and must therefore in the end want nihilism; this is the warning Nietzsche gave his contemporaries, who used the Nietzsche myth in order not to hear it (143).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">THE GAY SCIENCE

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">1: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh //from the whole truth// – for that, not even the bet have had enough sense of truth and the most gifted have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future – when the proposition ‘The species is everything, an individual is always nothing’ has become part of the humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only ‘gay science’ will remain.” 27-28

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">“Life and I and you and all of us became //interesting// to ourselves once again for a while,” (29)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">‘The discordant harmony of things’; from Horace, //Epistles// I.12.19

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">“Such persons have several feelings of pleasure and displeasure so strong that they reduce the intellect to silence or to servitude: at that point their heart displaces their head, and one speaks thenceforth of ‘passion’. (Occasionally we also encounter the opposite, the ‘reversal of passion’, as it were; for example, somebody once laid his hand on Fontenelle’s heart and said, ‘What you have here, my dear sir, is also brains.’)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">“It is very rare that a higher nature has enough reason left over to understand and treat commonplace people as what they are; above all, it believes in its own passion as something that is present in everyone but concealed, and in this belief it is full of arduor and eloquence” (32).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">6: //Loss of dignity. –// Reflection has lost all its dignity of form: we have made a laughing-stock of the ceremony and solemn gestures of reflection, and couldn’t stand an old-style wise man. We think too fast, while on our way somewhere, while walking or in the midst of all sorts of business, even when thinking of the most serious things, we need little preparation, not even much silence: it is as if we carried around in our heads an unstoppable machine that keeps working even under the most unfavourable circumstances. Formerly, one could tell just by looking at a person that he wanted to think – it was probably a rare occurrence! -, that he now wanted to become wiser and was preparing himself for a thought: one would set one’s face as for prayer and stop walking; yes, one stood still for hours on the street once the thought ‘arrived’- on one or two legs. The dignity of the matter required it!

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">Nietzsche on Anthopology, Study of Society?? “Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together – in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans – have they found their thinkers? […] To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate – that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material” (34). […] If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to //furnish// goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction – an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its Cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too. (35)”

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">NIETZSCHE ON SCIENCE

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">33: “//Outside the lecture-room.// – ‘In order to prove to you that man is fundamentally a good-natured animal, I would remind you of how credulous he has been for so long. Only now, quite late and after tremendous self-conquest, has he become a //distrustful// animal. Yes, man is now more evil than ever.’ I do not understand this: why should man be more distrustful and evil now? ‘Because he now has a science – needs a science.’ (53)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;">37: //Because of three errors. –// One has promoted science during the last centuries partly because it was through science that one hoped best to understand God’s goodness and wisdom – the main motive in the soul of the great Englishmen (such a Newton); partly because one believed in the absolute usefulness of knowledge, especially in the most intimate affiliation between morality, knowledge, and happiness – the main motive in the soul of the French (such as Voltaire); and partly because one believed that in science one had and loved something selfless, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent in which the evil drives of humanity had no part at all – the main motive in the soul of Spinoza, who felt divine in attaining knowledge – in sum, because of three errors.” (55)