As I began to read Nietzsche for the first time (beyond his renowned Thus Spoke Zarathustra), I immediately realized that I was in over my head. I took a seminar on Nietzsche where we read and discussed many of his major works, including the recently published Writings from the Late Notebooks. The more that I read, the more I became enamored with his iconoclastic motivations and bizarre methodology. His resistance to non-somatic epistemology is very refreshing. In many ways, I very much identify with what he was trying to do.And you have to love someone who has so much unashamed hatred for academics, Socrates, and Christianity alike. His aphorismic flights are almost as fantasical as they are disturbing. For instance, he list these top three destroyers of Europe (source: Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 21): 1) Christianity, 2) Alcoholic Poisoning of Europe, and 3) Syphilis.
As I have shared my enthusiasm for Nietzsche, there is an understandable trend in the reactions (mostly stares laced with possible intonations of heresy). Most people are interacting with Nietzsche very superficially, just as we interact with many of the influential scholars without appreciating the nuances of their approach. But because I am intensely interested in developing a somatically indwelled epistemology, Friedrich Nietzsche is a obvious interlocutor.
I would hope to merely motivate people, especially Christians, to give Nietzsche’s work another look. I will offer two juicy quotes as a means of wading into Friedrich’s world:
You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers?… There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni– if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship.
…Be a philosopher, be a mummy, portray monotono-theism with a gravedigger’s pantomime! — And above all, away with the body, this patheitc [pet idea] of the senses, afflicted with every logical error there is, refuted, even impossible — although it has the nerve to behave as if it were real!” -Twilight of the Idols“Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematising and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression - not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’.
Logic and mechanics never touch on causality –” -Writing from the Late Notebooks
When Nietzsche talks about the body, isn’t he himself just embodying the usual Romantic objection to Enlightenment rationalism? Reality isn’t delimited by what we know rationally but also includes what we feel. And these stuffy societal rules we’ve inherited from Christendom cramp our style too much. Isn’t that the gist of it? My sense is that Nietzsche isn’t so much about embodied knowing as about the old Greek split between body and soul, and Nietzsche thinks what is “good” for the body is at least as valuable as what is “good” for the soul/mind.
The body/soul debate, as you know, is an ancient one. I just finished reading Augustine’s “City of God” (it’s my minor area, historical theology, topic for my comps coming up in two weeks), and in Book 19, he gives an account of the pagan Varro’s 288 actual or potential schools of philosophy. Varro concludes that, since the human is a composite of both body and soul, the final good of a human includes both what is good for the soul and what is good for the body. But since virtue is what is good for the soul and since the person instructed in virtue will always prefer the good of the soul to that of the body (but without denying the body what it craves), the virtuous life is the happy life. Augustine isn’t too far from this actually since he believes that the body and soul are at war with each other (one consequence of the fall: man disobeyed God, so man’s body disobeys his mind). The chief difference is that he thinks in eschatological terms — the ultimate good isn’t to be found in this life — and he looks for a time when there will be peace between body and soul, body being submitted to mind, and mind being submitted to God. And for the time being, the mind must try to keep the body in submission. Augustine was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism.
Thanks for those funny quotes.
In response to you first question, I would say, “Not really.” I will hopefully develop this in future posts, but Nietzsche’s dedication to the body as ‘becoming experience’ and the only thing that can have epistemic meaning. He is not so concerned with the authority of society (although this is a minor theme) as he is with the people who reject the body as a fundmental centrality.
This may be a nuanced position, but I think it’s important to distinguish his distaste for Enlightenment rationality (a negative philosophy which we all share to some extent) from his positive epistemology and moral philosophy. I have posted another quip on his view of ’signs and errors’ to highlight how his epistemology, which is somatically oriented, is directly related to his moral philosophy. When he talks about error in relation to ‘becoming’, I believe his sights are set also up matters like good/bad and good/evil dichotomies.
In response to Augustine, I know nothing.
That’s interesting. I would have guessed that Nietzsche’s complaint against philosophers who dislike “becoming” had to do with the old being:becoming :: universal:particular :: one:many dichotomies that go back at least to Plato and have set the agenda for everything since. As one of my teachers pointed out, if ultimate good is identified with The One (Plato –> Neoplatonism), then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “the many” (particulars) are bad/evil. And if the One is reached through the mind (idealism), then the irrational body is just a hindrance. In many ways, the Enlightenment was just a renewal of Platonic mind-oriented idealism and the Romantic era was an a-rational, emotional, experience and body-based particularism. You go from emphasizing one side of the being/becoming dichotomy to the other. The modern era is a synthesis: the Enlightenment approach when it comes to so-called facts, and the Romantic approach when it comes to meaning, ethics, and aesthetics (so-called values). The old “footnotes to Plato” cliche — it turns out to be true!
Anyway … very thought-provoking stuff you’re writing here.
I’m not sure I would lump Nietzsche in with garden-variety Romanticists. I think his ‘Notebooks’ betray a much more analytic critique than he offers in his published collection. Also, Nietzsche does not shy away from the disregard of particular feelings in the pursuit of value-creation.