Nietzsche



My prior experience with Nietzsche has been limited. I knew a quote from him, which is frequently used in popular media. It goes, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Little did I know that this speaks to the consumption of his very own philosophy and those of us who may one day read his works. I feel like I have been gazing into something over the past week, but I am not quite sure what that is yet or how it is going to affect me.

Here are some quotes which resonated with me (and a few asides).


 * From Blanchot: **

“This question will help us consider why the thought of nihilism, which retains all its historical, political, and literary vigor, seems— and even because of the verifications time accords it—almost naive and like the still tranquil dream of a "better" age” (136).

Exploit with energy!

“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” (137-8). “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. This is expressed by a certain direction that is perceptible in each text and that orients it. But, by the gravitational force of a "title," it sometimes happens that several of these organisms unite in a larger ensemble that they in turn render living. This process is accomplished with extraordinary rapidity: as though formed by the secretions of a supersaturated seawater [eau-mere] become crystalline, the work instantaneously becomes visible and present. A crystallization that often fails to occur.”

Crystallization that often fails to occur...

“The essential movement of Nietzsche's thought consists in self-contradiction; each time it affirms, the affirmation must be put in relation with the one opposing it: the decisive point of each of its certitudes passes through contestation, goes beyond it, and returns to it” (140).

“This "whole" is neither a concept, nor a system. The incomparably instructive force of Nietzsche's thought is precisely in alerting us to a non-systematic coherence, such that all that relates to it seems to press in from all sides in order to resemble a coherent system, all the while differing from one” (140).

The last philosopher

“The central experience for Nietzsche, as for romanticism, in this view, is man's degradation by capitalism, which tends to reduce everything to the mode of the thing. This alteration of the human by capitalism liberated a superabundance of anarchic feelings, without root and without use, at the same time as it impoverished affective life, brought about excessive intellectualization and a general spiritual abasement” (142).

“What is nihilism”…”That the highest values devaluate themselves” (144).

“everything that, not without value, nonetheless has no value of its own; there is nothing man can lean upon, no thing of value other than through the meaning, in the end suspended, that man gives to it” (144).

Infinite negation opens space for unlimited knowledge

“Science cannot but be nihilist; it is the meaning of a world deprived of meaning, a knowledge that is founded on the last ignorance” (146).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“the overman is not the man of today elevated disproportionally, nor a species of man who would reject the human only to make the arbitrary his law and titanic madness his rule; he is not the eminent functionary of some will to <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">power, any more than he is an enchanter destined to introduce paradisiacal bliss on earth. The overman is he who alone leads man to be what he is: the being who surpasses himself, and in whose surpassing there is affirmed the necessity of his passing” (147).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“the will would rather will nothingness than not will" (148).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“Even in its opposition to dialectic, it must arise out of a dialectic” (151).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“that he presupposes it rather than gives it exposition, in order, further on, to speak according <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">to a very different language: no longer of the whole but of the fragment, of plurality, of separation.”

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“It is difficult to grasp this speech of fragment without altering it.”

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“Nietzsche, however, is not unaware that he is obliged to think from where he is, and obliged to speak on the basis of the discourse he is challenging. He still belongs to this discourse—we all belong to it; thus the contradictions cease to be polemical, or even only critical. They aim at him, he himself, in his thought; they <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">are the expression of this energetic thought that cannot be content with its own truths without putting them to the test, assaying them, going beyond them, and then again coming back to them” (153).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“But what about thought, when being-unity, the identity of being—has withdrawn without giving way to nothingness, that too easy refuge? What about thought when the Same is no longer the ultimate meaning of the Other, and Unity no longer that in relation to which the multiple is said? When plurality is said, without referring back to the One? Then, perhaps then, one might have a sense of the exigency of fragmentary speech, not as a paradox but as a decision: speech that, far from being unique, is not predicated of the one and does not say the one in its plurality. Language: affirmation itself, that which no longer affirms by reason of, nor with a view to Unity. An affirmation of difference, but nonetheless never differing. Plural speech” (156).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“Nietzsche expresses himself in still another way: "The world: the infinite of interpretation (the unfolding of a designation, infinitely)." Hence the obligation tointerpret. But who, then, will interpret? Is it man? And what sort of man?Nietzsche responds: "One may not ask: \vho then interprets?'for interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, it exists (not as a 'being'but as a 'process,' a "becoming') as affect” (164).

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">“Nietzsche does not think highly of language: "Language depends upon the most naive prejudices. If our reading of things discovers problems and disharmonies, this is because we think only in the form of language—and thus believe in the 'eternal truth'of'reason' (for example: subject, attribute, etc.). We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of'language."