Comments on: But, Dad, don’t we eat the antelope?

By: thisacademiclife.blogspot.com

thisacademiclife.blogspot.com — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:58:55 +0000

Not sure that the concept of "literal truth" makes much sense when reading Nietzsche. Weber got it right, IMHO: "empirics" in a post-Enlightenment world is a form of disciplined fact-creation based on ex ante value-commitments that can't be justified rationally or evaluated "scientifically." [Pragmatically, now, there's a different question altogether.] So although asking whether Nietzsche thinks that his story is "literally true" is a good way of getting students into a serious discussion about genealogy, I would be very wary of trying to answer that question in any definitive way. Also, I'd be very careful treating the first essay of GM in isolation. After all, as the book goes on, the priests are revealed to be a) the coocoon of the philosophers; b) the introduction of the most productive tension in human life, the one that makes man an interesting animal; and arguably c) the necessary step to the production of the higher man and the saving of the will ("the human being would rather will nothingness than not will" -- although this translation misses the verbal parallel in the German between "Nichts" ("nothingness") and "nicht wollen" ("not will")…ah well). Punchline: you're right that the Grand Vizier isn't "evil" in anything like a Disney sense, but he doesn't "win" either. He's neither good nor evil; pardon the Nietzschean cleverness, but in historical perspective he's "beyond good and evil." He's just another cog in a vast historical machine that has no meaning except that which we choose to impose on it in retrospect. What's interesting here is the imposition of meaning, and in that respect I think that the best use of The Lion King would be to see the film itself as an exercise of the priestly will-to-power in taming the savage beast -- the Circle of Life as the Spirit of Gravity, so to speak, and Simba's kid as the Last Man (blink. blink.). Or show them the whole Matrix trilogy and ask them whether Agent Smith is evil.

By: Rowen Blake

Rowen Blake — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 02:45:36 +0000

Ah, now I remember why I got out of philosophy! Thanks, guys. Please don’t use the Lion King story—egads, there’s little enough pleasure in the world. Those students have positive, even tender, associations with the LK—and the story just breaks down as you proceed towards the relationship analysis. Isn’t it possible that N. believed in the genealogy even whilst suspecting it a myth? In our vain self-awareness, we act out mythical constructs which hide insipid, common stories.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 17:53:47 +0000

By: Njorl

Njorl — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:53:24 +0000

I think the conflict between king and priest is quite literal. It may be that Nietzsche was trying to make some other point, and using the idealized version to do so, but the conflict is manifest. One objection I have is to his calling priests impotent. While they may have less immediately disposable physical power, the flogging of Henry II, among many other examples, demonstrates that the priests are not impotent. This lack of impotence is not limited to religious priests. Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are essentially priests in this context, though more in the line of Savanarola than Richelieux. I think it is also interesting to see what happens in the exceptional case – when the King and Priest are the same man. Literally, this was essentially true in Henry VIII. While he did have Cranmer, his bitterness and pettiness, spawned from jealousy for power that he actually did posess, led to great cruelty. Such a circumstance also plagued Richard Nixon. There is probably no president in modern times who was more of his own “Vizier” than Nixon.

By: bellatrys

bellatrys — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 12:45:17 +0000

Good old Nietzsche – playing Procrustes and conveniently ignoring the whole IE business of the Ksatriyas and the Brahmans being one and the same, and the historical unity between priestly and kingly/warrior classes throughout the ancient world, and the developing ethics which are embodied in the angst of the Mahabharata and the ease with which warrior-princes segue into becoming ascetic mystics throughout the Eurasian tradition… Something Nietzsche really has little excuse for, because all this comparative mythology/language/culture stuff was getting going back then – and popular, in a pop-culture way, too. Yes, it brought us the Lemurians and the Thetans and assorted New Agey weirdnesses – but it also brought us The Golden Bough and on a wider scale, the idea that things we think are unique about Christianity and/or Western Culture™ really aren’t.

By: plover

plover — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 12:19:55 +0000

For the genealogical project, isn’t The Gay Science §7 (“Something for the industrious”) a vital reference? The note from the end of Genealogy I seems like a stab at beginning those “cyclopic buildings” invoked in the earlier work – an attempt to move the idea from a broad vision to a more concrete proposal.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 06:39:45 +0000

Anderson: I did not say that Nietzsche amounted to a typical late 19th century aesthete, privileging the special sphere of art and the “beautiful” above all else, but, to the contrary, that he made a radicalizing move, displacing a basically aesthetic normativity on to the whole, or, better, all, of existence as such, (in both the existential and positivist senses of existence.) Obviously then, there is no longer any sense of privileging art and the beautiful, nor merely of emphasizing the separateness and hence amorality of their criteria, let alone of leveraging them into Flaubert’s ambition to be a “great demoralizer”, -(no doubt, a source of Nietzsche’s identification of aestheticism with decadence.) Rather I take Nietzsche’s self-designation as an “immoralist” to indicate he intends his position to have a distinctively ethical,- (not to say, evangelical),- cast. But the basic point I was making is that once one makes such a thorough-going, “aestheticizing” move, standard philosophical/cognitive questions about truth or belief- “games of truth and falsehood”, Foucault would say- and the supposed (relativistic) paradoxes involved don’t quite apply with full force. The opposition between empirical reality and myth, so natural to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, is shifted. Hence, the effort to extort “psychological” truth from Nietzsche’s tales and deliverances amounts to an attempt to reduce him to terms he treats with parodic irony. (His “aestheticism” is supremely a subjectivism, but it is precisely not psychologistic: “transvaluations” are distinctive acts, not expressions of laws or tendencies.) But the attempt to portray him as a myth-monger is even worse, as in his early 20th century reception, whether aesthticized or politicized, that viewed the deliberate creation of myths as necessary to the restoration of “meaning”. The whole point of Nietzschean “genealogy” is that a recursion or return to an “origin”, an “organic” whole, a state in which human beings could be unproblematically “at home”, is an impossiblity. No such thing could escape the “play” and conflict of “forces”. “Genealogy” amounts to an excavation of a present, not a rooting in a past. (Did not Nietzsche speak of a “cause-finding superstition”?) In this, for all his antiquarian tones, he remains most modern. Still, the effort to rationally understand Nietzsche’s work, even given is anti-Platonic, anti-systematic position, can not be foresworn in favor of an idolatry of the work. The recognition of his generalized deployment of a basically aestheitic normativity, (which had its roots in a collapsed, but still aestheticized German Idealism), I would maintain is essential to that effort. Otherwise, the “Dionysian” becomes a willful embrace of chaos,- (the deepest fear of the Kantian mind),- and the “will-to-power” becomes a celebration of unchecked violence and brute domination. Was not one of Nietzsche’s standard rhetorical moves the deliberately ironical invitation to such misunderstanding, through the deployment of a naturalistic vocabulary? If Nietsche’s thought amounts to a species of counter-Enlightenment criticism, it is staged on thoroughly Enlightened premises. Rather than asking Prof. Holbo’s misplaced question as to what exactly Nietzsche actually believed, let alone presuming to answer it, it would be better to ask the properly Nietzschean question as to what in our beliefs is and remains genuine. In this age of (once again) triumphant delusion, Nietzsche remains our uncanniest guest.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 06:19:46 +0000

The only women in any of this were lamenting, strangely enough. Or being raped.

By: radek

radek — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:07:05 +0000

I don’t know, asking questions like “What did Nietzshe really think?” is a bit like asking historical counterfactual “What if?” questions. Sometimes when the question is specific and well formulated, when a good deal of primary material exists and when the answerer has a thorough knowledge of the subject this type of inquiry can be taken semi-seriously (“Would slavery have survived in the South if not for the Civil War?” – “What precisely did Marx mean by capital”). But a lot of the time there isn’t much that can be said except that the guy’s dead and we can’t ask for a clerification. (or for the historical what if: “What would’ve happened if Hitler died at age 2?”) Even if, I don’t think your average undergrad knows enough Nietzshe to be able to answer that question. Why not ask them if THEY think it literal or allegorical? Ask for historical/mythical examples and counterexamples.

By: radek

radek — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:04:54 +0000

“CuChulainn in the Irish myths” I think this goes back to the whole “what is a hero/is Achilles a hero?” controversy from a while back. On the other hand there is Egill of the Icelandic Eddas who combines the two characters within one person quite well. Or Odysseus for that matter. In fact I’m reasonably sure that most kings, nation builders and conquerors were both the knight and the priest – that’s how they got things done.(Someone mentioned Constantine a few post back).

By: Mark Eli Kalderon

Mark Eli Kalderon — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 03:47:30 +0000

Doesn’t Nietzsche’s tale of the clash between the priestly and military sub-castes have to do with a problem with his main philological hypothesis of the first section, namely, that moral terms derive etymologically from political terms? Potential counterexample: purity. What does purity have to do with power? Speculative answer: Nietzsche hypothesizes a clash between the priestly and military sub-castes of the nobility. Once this clash arises, the priests begin explicitly to distinguish themselves from the warriors by adopting the rituals of purity—only eating certain foods, only sleeping with “clean” women, etc. So talk of “purity” did have a political significance after all, and the alleged counterexample is no counterexample at all. Given that the historical speculation that Nietzsche is engaged in is in defense of his philology, it strikes me that it has everything to do with his suggestion about a prize essay. As to its speculative nature, it is less fictional history than it is inference to the best explanation.

By: George

George — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 23:00:54 +0000

John H: fascinating post, thank you. Don’t know a ton about Nietszche, but I’m struck by the assumption that knights and priests are natural types rather than social constructs. The English rule of primogeniture (IIRC) dictated that first sons were knights, second sons were clergy, and third sons were out of luck. In fact, at the moment I can only think of a few historical cases that fit N.’s archetypal situation, even poorly: maybe Emperor Frederick and the Pope, or Henry II and Thomas Becket. The really epic schemers (Richard III, Rasputin) have taken advantage not of “blond beasts” but of weak figureheads. Lee S: Extraordinary to hear that you draw so much Nietszche from the first Matrix movie, since I’ve always remarked upon that film’s similarities to the Christ story. Though I suppose that could make perfect sense, at some level.

By: WeSaferThemHealthier

WeSaferThemHealthier — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 22:54:33 +0000

John Holbo ( actually, anybody with the answer ), Could you remind me why, if the knights are stronger than the priests, the priests won? How could the priests get a handle on the knights if they’re really knightly?

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 22:02:52 +0000

I take the basic, “foundational” move by Nietzsche to be a thorough-going, radicalized aestheticism: that the world, existence, is to be “justified” solely as an aesthetic phenomemon. This is a common understanding of N., but I think it’s mistaken. That’s N. in his first book. Later, N. rejects any question of the “justification” of existence as a sign of decadence, together with the art that such would-be-justifiers cling to.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 21:58:21 +0000

Thinking about it, the life of Lee Kuan Yew and the historical development of Singapore offers ample illustrations of Nietszchean themes which is presumably why he’s on the syllabus.