razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: nietszche

The role of the philosopher in relation to life – some notes on creativity and stupidity

I’ve just posted the text of a talk I gave at ‘Kant’s Cave’ a couple of years back. The paper presents a ‘creative’ concept of philosophy that is central to the work of both Nietzsche and Deleuze and one of the problems that such creativity encounters, the problem of stupidity. One note of caution – the text is primarily a ‘reading’ intended for a philosophically aware but generalised audience and aimed to prompt discussion about the role of the individual in relation to the social, so it skims over some key epistemological problems, such as the concept of ‘experience’ and it does not directly explore ontological issues surrounding the concept of ‘life’. It is available on academia.edu .

The role of the philosopher in relation to life

May 13, 2015
Learning necessities

It seems a strange thing to want to do, to learn the necessities. It makes me think of learning very different types of thing. On the one hand, it seems like a positive axiom that would benefit everyone in their day to day life – ‘learn the necessities’. Work out how to do the basic functions that enable one day to follow another, one meal to follow another, in order to be able to do anything else. The trouble perhaps is that almost immediately I begin to hear a parental tone, ‘learn the necessities before you go gallivanting’. As the parental tone comes into mind, the obvious axiom becomes less clearly one to be simply accepted. An axiom in the parental tone has very different connotations from one emanating from an internal rational harmony with the axiom, which is how it’s tone is first heard.

Part of the nature of the parental tone is that it inspires rejection – and rightly so. Unless the parental tone made the teenager feel like someone simply repeated the obvious endlessly the right tone hasn’t been achieved by the parent. Repetition of the obvious is the nature of parental advice, possibly the basis of much parental language as a whole if the truth be told. There’s no escaping the overwhelming presence of the role when in the role of being a parent. It’s not an open space of creativity. The parent is the drawdown on creativity in many, many ways and necessarily so. The parent who doesn’t fulfil the role of drawing down the dynamic of the creative teenager runs the risk of that abdication enabling failure at a catastrophic level. Isn’t this the lesson of Icarus?

It seems all the more curious then to find Nietzsche, seemingly, advocating a kind of extreme drawing down of the creative chaos we now mostly encounter within teenager lives. It’s not a teenage chaos, of course, it simply happens that it’s teenagers who currently present this chaos in my own parental space. The chaos that my teenagers let me encounter can be found in many many more spaces, by far and away most of them being adult spaces, adult chaos, adult spaces in which what we realise is that the chaos is there because it can be anywhere and everywhere, because it’s an amorphous chaos. It’s this amorphous chaos that Nietzsche seems to be trying to draw down when he declares his desire to ‘learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things’ (GS 276). This amorphous chaos, which might manifest in western teenage sociality might elsewhere manifest as war, or bureaucracy, or management practice. It’s a chaos of differential drives and entwined tensions. Moreoever it seemed at some points, as we read through Nietzsche, that he declared a love for this amorphous chaos, a love that was filial and affirmative. ‘Chaos sive natura’, as Lawrence Hatab notes (Hatab 14). This affirmation seems at odds with the need to learn the necessities, necessities of life. It is a tension that comes out in that curous antithetical axiom that Nieztsche offers us, Amor Fati. ‘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…’ (GS 276 in Hatab 20).

The tension, between affirming the chaos and affirming the learning of the necessities, resolves, for Hatab, through a reading of the Nietzsche that foregrounds his ideas about the Greek tragic centrality of the agon. Hatab offers us an ‘existential naturalism’ in his Nietzsche, a meaningful compromise of meaning and science. This is a naturalism that seems to accept science yet with the caveat that this type of naturalism is ‘not a reductive naturalism in terms of scientific categories, but an embrace of the finite limit conditions of world existence as the new measure of thought’ (Hatab 7). This type of caveat, however, is highly problematic.

For Hatab the existential naturalism of Nietzsche will entail learning specific necessities, necessities that derive from an ontology of differential drives and entwined tensions that Nietzsche posits in his concept of the ‘will to power’. At the heart of those entailments is a general axiom regarding infinity and the infinity of truth in particular. For Hatab’s Nietzsche appears to deny an atemporal essence of truth and in doing so also deny truth any temporal infinity.

Hatab’s sketches what he calls a chronophobia, a condition diagnosed by Nietzsche with regard to the nature of Western thought.

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Lawrence Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence, Routledge, 2005

April 19, 2013
Zizek, Chesterton and restrictions.

Zizek, in an essay that primarily focuses on the debate between Derrida and Foucault on the subject of ‘madness’, makes some interesting comments on the nature of the limit. To quote at some length:

This brings us to the necessity of Fall: what the Kantian link between dependence and autonomy amounts to is that Fall is unavoidable, a necessary step in the moral progress of man. That is to say, in precise Kantian terms: “Fall” is the very renunciation of my radical ethical autonomy; it occurs when I take refuge in a heteronomous Law, in a Law which is experience as imposed on me from the outside, i.e., the finitude in which I search for a support to avoid the dizziness of freedom is the finitude of the external-heteronomous Law itself. Therein resides the difficulty of being a Kantian. Every parent knows that the child’s provocations, wild and “transgressive” as they may appear, ultimately conceal and express a demand, addressed at the figure of authority, to set a firm limit, to draw a line which means “This far and no further!”, thus enabling the child to achieve a clear mapping of what is possible and what is not possible. (And does the same not go also for hysteric’s provocations?) This, precisely, is what the analyst refuses to do, and this is what makes him so traumatic – paradoxically, it is the setting of a firm limit which is liberating, and it is the very absence of a firm limit which is experienced as suffocating. THIS is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implication is precisely that there is nobody outside, no external agent of “natural authority”, who can do the job for me and set me my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural “unruliness.” Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us: what Kant aims at is not the philosophical commonplace according to which, in contrast to animals whose behavioural patterns are grounded in their inherited instincts, man lacks such firm coordinates which, therefore, have to be imposed on him from the outside, through a cultural authority; Kant’s true aim is rather to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened “mature” human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations. This basic Kantian (and also Hegelian) lesson was put very clearly by Chesterton: “Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice.”
(Zizek; Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan, http://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html, Lacan.com 2007; accessed 3/12/2012. The Chesterton quote is from Orthodoxy, FQ Publishing, 2004. The passage is also found in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism; Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Zizek, Continuum 2009, p98. Emphasis added.)

The reference to Chesterton is interesting, particularly when put back into context. Chesterton is a curious figure, not one I resonate with. For Zizek he appears as a kind of perennial coach. For my part, my distaste probably stems from the whiff of hypocrisy that attends the Catholic intellectual. The suggestion of Sainthood that was apparently once raised in relation to Chesterton only added to that bad smell. Despite this, the role of paradoxical thinking in his work is one that, elsewhere, I have found fascinating and it is no doubt this role of paradox that Zizek latches onto and that underlies that particular formula Zizek extracts. The Chestertonian formula is aimed at those, like Nietzsche, who are taken to have a general and productive or positive concept of the will. The will, for Chesterton, is negative, a privative, restrictive concept that always, by definition, limits by negating. To quote Chesterton, again at some length:
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December 3, 2012
NVC Reading notes #5 (Some Themes for Thought)

As a pedagogic device for working on NVC the suggestion I made to my students is that a series of ‘themes’ are identified which then provide a backbone for ‘indexing’ some of the content with a view to building up a ground for exegetical work. The idea would be to take each theme – or at least a selection of them – and find relevant passages within the text in order to then have a focused selection from the text to think about. Obviously these themes interlock but the need to ‘ignore’ some things to focus on others is a methodological tool, enabling us to gain some focus before perhaps expanding again. (This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list of the themes that might be extracted from NVC, nor even a list of the themes which might be thought to be the ‘most central’ or ‘most obvious’. It arises from a particular class and discussion and as such is located in that context is intended to be added to and improved through discussion). (more…)

March 16, 2009
NVC Reading notes #4

Klossowski – Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle – Reading notes for Ch.s 3-5

(These notes are partially exegetical for students and partially exploratory for myself).

CH3

The ‘Eternal Return’ is the thought experiment from Nietzsche, the central presentation of which is found in ‘The Gay Science’, S.341 and runs as follows:

‘The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?’

In the ‘Will to Power’ #1066 Nietzsche makes a more argumentative presentation although it is still in the form of a hypothetical, a thought experiment (note the opening – ‘If the world may be thought…’ which is akin to saying ‘Just suppose for the sake of argument…’ and then setting up an argument of the If…then… format which I have inserted into the text in italics in this case. If we pay attention to this way of arguing we can see that it is both very compressed and contains a chain of implications from a basic ontological model. The paragraph could be unpacked by trying to reconstruct the line or argument – in other words by trying to make explicit all possible suppressed premises.): (more…)

February 13, 2009
NVC Reading notes #3

Reading Chapters 1 and 2 of NVC we come fully and squarely up against the peculiarity of Klossowski’s text. The discussion interprets and does so using a swathe of textual evidence but the interpretation is not a gentle teasing out of an argument, a kind of ‘efficient paraphrasing’, rather it is a positioned interpretation. That is, it offers a reading of Nietzsche that attempts to articulate a position with regards the body of Nietzsche’s work. That is to say, it both suggests a reading of Nietzsche that is a ’cause’ (ie; what Nietzsche says ‘comes first’ and our understanding is the effect of this) and it offers a reading of Nietzsche that makes Nietzsche an ‘effect’ of the reading (such that the reading ‘comes first’ and only through this reading do we come to understand Nietzsche). This curious ambiguity means that the reading is offering a ‘way of reading’. It is, as it were, intended to make us see Nietzsche’s work in a particular way. The danger, of course, is in distorting (‘doing violence to’) the Nietzschean corpus. The question is, what are we to make of Klossowski’s reading? If we were to assess it simply on its textual accuracy, whether it is that ‘efficient paraphrase’ so beloved of secondary academic texts (Introductions to …) then we would miss the performative aspect of Klossowski’s reading, the way in which he wants to do something with the corpus and make it do something anew. Of course we have to allow that Klossowski has a desire to bring some truth to light rather than assume he is trying to mislead us or merely ‘read Nietzsche for his own purposes’ but to do so we have to acknowledge that in some way it is only through making Nietzsche into his own that Klossowski can reveal something interesting about Nietzsche. It is because of this peculiar reciprocity between Nietzsche’s corpus and Klossowski’s reading of it that we should perhaps speak of the ‘Klossowskian-Nietzschean’ (K-N) account offered in NVC rather than think of the book as merely an ‘interpretation’ of Nietzsche in the weak sense of paraphrase.

What is it that Klossowski pushes to the fore then? There is a distrust of thinking as a pure and moral capacity within Klossowski that he wishes to draw out of Nietzsche and pursue. This is grounded in a tension between the individual as thinker and the society of which they are a product. The terms Klossowski uses are the gregarious and the singular (NVC: 4) where the gregarious is the name given to the social aspect and the singular the name given to that which opposes or comes into conflict with the social. The social is above all formed in the context of language, or the ‘code of everyday signs’ and the tension can be understood as one between an immediacy located in the ‘singularity that we are’ and a mediation of that singularity in the ‘code of everyday signs’. Roughly speaking we might think of this as a situation in which we are somehow trapped in language. Each time we try and think or express something, in particular each time we try and express our ‘depth’ (present the ‘true self that we are’, though this phrase is highly troublesome) we are betrayed by language.

This way of presenting things of course assumes that there is some way in which we are which can be betrayed. It would suggest, for example, that there is a real or true (we might say, following Heidegger, an ‘authentic’) self which we cover over and betray (fail to express) simply because any act of expression mediates the immediate. We might want to fall back on means of expression that aren’t linguistic and suggest that art, perhaps, is a means of authentic expression of the immediacy that is our depth precisely because it isn’t caught within the ‘code of everyday signs’. If we do this, however, we need to be careful to avoid an obvious problem – if we ‘read’ an artwork as expressing something more truthfully, and this ‘something’ is taken to be a meaning, then for Klossowski-Nietzsche it looks like we will fall back into the code of everyday signs because the code of everyday signs is not simply language but meaning itself. Meaning is mediation and any search for meaning falls into the position of betraying our depth which is outside of any meaning. Klossowski-Nietzsche claim that “our depth is unexchangeable because it does not signify anything” (NVC: 31). Are we not left at a dead-end then? Can we simply not say or express anything since there is no meaning? This would amount to a form of quietism, of a giving up in the face of a nihilistic understanding of life and the social. This, i think, would be a mistake and a mis-reading of K-N because it would make it difficult to understand the ‘combat’ which it seems is central to the ethical drive of NVC.

The first chapter, in which we find the ‘Combat against Culture’, supposes that there is something of interest in the conflict between the unexchangeable depth of the singular and the gregarious leveling of the social. If the social is a form of indoctrination, an imposition of a morality that commonly makes thinking and the thinker / philosopher into little more than lie-makers that produce ways in which the social can reproduce itself to the detriment of the singular, then where does the impulse or force of the singular come form. Do we posit something like an original singularity to each ‘subject’ which is then swallowed up in the social? Where did this singularity come from, what produced it? It would be a mistake, I believe, to attribute some ‘original subjectivity’ to K-N. Instead we will find the ‘depth’ described as chaos, as a flux or soup of impulses, a chaos that is formed into a singularity. The ‘formation’ of this singularity is what we need to investigate and what K-N will do so through the concept of ‘formations of sovereignty’ found later in NVC. Roughly speaking, the singular is nothing other than a formation of sovereignty in which one impulse (drive, force, instinct are all analogous concepts although not identical) triumphs over another. The “affects are enslaved by other affects – and not (at least not initially) by the affects of other individuals but by those within the same individual” (NVC: 10). It is not the social that ‘imposes’ itself on the singular but rather the singular that trains itself into becoming a ‘reasonable, rational and competent individual (member of society)’. We train ourselves to be slavish, we are not trained and imposed upon by some ‘oppressive’ force from outside. Consciousness triumphs over desire and we become reasonable people (NVC: 10).

(more on Ch 1 and 2 to come)

January 19, 2009
NVC Reading notes #2

If one of the first impressions on reading NVC is that something like a ‘psycho-analysis’ is being done then it is worth asking why this impression occurs and what relation to Freud exists. That it should be, in a sense, relatively uncontroversial to suggest NVC ‘reads like’ a psycho-analytic text comes from the emphasis of the biological, biographical and historical interpretation of ‘forces at work’ in Nietzsche, an emphasis on these bio-facts rather than on the texts that resulted. The texts are to be read as expressions of something underneath, something which we might encounter a little like we encounter the unconscious. Texts become symptoms to interpret, something with which to diagnose the ‘real’ or ‘important’ forces that are the ‘truth’ of Nietzsche’s work.

This, however, brings us close to one of the first difficulties. If we take a Freudian psycho-analytic interpretation to occur, as it were, from ‘outside’ the subject then close attention to Klossowski would suggest that the exact opposite is the practice of NVC. For example, in psycho-analytic practice / interpretation the relation of the analyst / interpreter to the analysand / interpreted is crucially important. The establishment of transference, the encounter with an ‘Other’ and the centrality of what i would call the ‘relation as revealing’ suggests a prime importance is given to a kind of sociality. We might say that for psychoanalysis, it is in our ‘being-with’ (mitsein) we find our being. The analyst / interpreter justifies their position on the basis that the addition of their position is necessary to establish this being-with which is a precondition of finding the truth of the analysand /interpreted. This sociality, this being-with, however, is a being-with of subjects and subjects are constituted as language speaking, meaning using beings. Being-with reveals being because it is a kind of ‘being with meaningful beings’. If this seems obscure then let me put it in more colloquial terms.

Take being-with to be ‘sociality’. The claim is something like ‘the way we are with others reveals the way we are’. Thus sociality is just this ‘being with others’ but it is in this ‘others’ that the presupposition can slip through, the metaphysical contraband. To see this think of the situation in which the others are animals, not ‘humans’. The distinction is important because it is as meaning using beings that we place ‘humans’ in a privileged and unthought position of social pre-eminence. Why is it, for example, that the dog you talk to or the cat you confess to cannot play the role of an analyst / interpreter? It is because they cannot offer this ‘mirror of meaning’, they cannot play the role of an analyst because they cannot talk. It is not what an analyst says, of course but the fact that they could say which enables them to play the role they do. It is not that the analysand talks which makes analysis the ‘talking cure’ but rather that the analysand talks to someone who can hear, by which we mean someone who can also talk (and talk back).

How, then, does NVC differ from psychoanalysis?

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January 13, 2009
Revision for Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy

For my 3rd year students in NMEP. (This is just a brief and partial account of the discussion today and students are welcome to continue the discussion here on on the WebCT bulletin board if they want a little more privacy, this is a public site after all.)

Today we discussed the way in which we think the subject by exploring the problems involved in the idea of ‘loving a robot/loving a simulation/loving a simulacrum’ and how these might be teased apart. A large part of our understanding of both Klossowski and Deleuze’s works on Nietzsche involve us in thinking about the way in which there is a problem for them, what exactly it is that motivates them, as it were, to write and think in the way they do, particularly when the initial impression when confronted by these two works (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle:NVC and Nietzsche and Philosophy:NP) is one of disorientation. As we approach an exam we need to supplement the detailed exegetical work done in the essays and the reading seminars with a ‘step back’ that enables us to get a broad sense of dynamics and lines of thought. To that end it is important to remember, I suggested, that Nietzsche is one of the ‘masters of suspicion’ (along with Marx and Freud – the phrase itself originates form Paul Ricoeur) and that both Klossowski and Deleuze begin form a position congruent with such suspicion in that they begin thinking by distrusting the way we think and speak. We use words and as we use them assume we know what they mean, until we are asked what they mean when we find confusion and disagreement. The words we use are capable of possessing us with the feeling that we know something, they possess a sense (or affect, feeling) of sense that we need to be suspicious of in order to begin to think critically. This doers not mean we simply throw out our intuitive relation to meanings and the sense of things, since such a rejection would also imply that we somehow knew what it was we were meaning and now reject it. Uncritical rejection is no better than uncritical possession. Thus the task is to ask, how might we think about the concepts of subject when the language and sense of the concept already exists, how might we think, as it were, in spite of the possession of sense. To do this, I suggested, both Klossowski and Deleuze attempt something we can think of as a reframing of the questions, a redrawing of the lines of debate. This idea of a reframing of the problem is perhaps simplifying things but for now, as a kind of working device or ‘rule of thumb’ to enable us to develop understanding (what is called a ‘heuristic‘), it will suffice.

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April 17, 2008
NVC Reading notes #1

(Notes primarily for the use of my 3rd year undergrad students on the Nietzsche and Modern European Philosophy course, terms 2 and 3, in which we’re studying Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ and Deleuze’s ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and exploring the problematic of post-structuralism. Page references to the Continuum impacts edition of NVC).

The intention here is to follow a ‘reading strategy’ in which we acknowledge that the style of thinking that occurs within NVC (and perhaps more widely within post-structuralist thinkers) is that of a weave or tapestry, in which words and concepts are introduced without explicit definition and these words are then employed (used) within a line of thought. The meaning of the terms within the text is to be produced through the work of the text, such that the book will constitute its own context within which key terms can be thought through rather than simply argued about. This is not to say that argument is irrelevant, not at all, but rather to emphasise something like a principle of ‘meaning is use’ that underlies much of NVC. Structuralism itself made use of ‘binaries’ in order to begin its analysis with structures and not elements (employed/employer: man/woman: expert/amateur etc), for the simple methodological fact that a single term would be an element and if we are to begin with structures then this must mean, in terms of language and conceptualisation, beginning from relations between words or concepts (what for ease I will simply refer to as ‘terms’). Post-structuralism, then, will continue its emphasis on structures, and as such will continue to find much of interest in the technique of using binaries or pairings of terms although it will not want to presuppose a final and definite order that can be produced from such an analysis. Our reading strategy, then, works on the basis of trying to identify interesting ‘key-words’ that we then try to understand conceptually by examining their oppositional terms. Concretely this begins from finding something that we can identify as a claim and then working backwards and forwards within the immediate context in which the claim is made to try and clarify the relations at work in a particular space of the text. These ‘partial analyses’ will then enable us to begin to reconstruct something like a ‘line of thought or argument’ that is made by the text (or perhaps, better, one of many lines of argument that will be made by the text).

Beginning at the bottom of page 8 and going onto page 9, we find some of the central questions within the first chapter, ‘The combat against culture’, sitting at the head of a short (3 paragraphs) line of argument. Here, as part of that partial analysis just mentioned, I want to pick out four ‘key-words’: reciprocity, idiosyncracy, culture and objectivation.

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April 15, 2008
bordering on coherence

[NOTE TO ANY READER: this post is a classic example of pinball thought, ricochet rather than writing, a ‘thinking out loud’. Beware of any apparent seriousness and discussion.]

In a recent post on his blog Poetix discusses the ‘object oriented’ philosophy of Graham Harman. I have only recently come across Harmans’ work, primarily because I have only recently returned to work on Heidegger and his various books began appearing in 2002, when I was deeply immersed in Deleuziana. His approach looks fascinating and is one I hope to more familiar with by the end of the year.

Poetix begins his post with the claim that an object cannot be fully understood through relationality because it must maintain an unrelatable element. It must maintain this ‘occult’ aspect of an unrelated element because if it did not then “there would be no object as such, but only the differential field of appearances itself“. The use of the phrase ‘differential field’ here immediately enables a connection to Deleuze’s philosophy (amongst others perhaps), not least because of his Nietzschean inspired claim that an object is nothing but a conjunction of forces (cf NP). For Deleuze, then, an object is nothing but that which is produced by a differential field of forces. It looks like we might have two very different answers to the problem of object-ness at work here, two different answers to a question such as ‘is an object nothing but the relations which constitute it?’ When you can get two clearly different solution vectors to a specific question then there is an opportunity to think a problem (in this case that of the object-ness of objects) through conceptual confrontation, through the tensions of thought.

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February 25, 2008