Nietzsche and Marriage

I am quite exhausted today so I am going to post a couple aphorisms by Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human.

406

"Marriage as a long conversation. When entering marriage one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversation with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time interaction is spent in conversation."

BUT

426

"Free spirits and marriage. Will free spirits live with women? In general, I believe that, as the true-thinking, truth-speaking men of the present, they must, like the prophetic birds of ancient times, prefer to fly alone."

***

In some cases I agree with these, in others I disagree. They are both sexist in varying degrees...anyway, i don't feel like commenting on them.

Love

Love, my readers and brothers, is, in the world and in life, the most tragic thing there is. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. Love is consolation in desolation, it is the only remedy against death, since it is death's sister.

--Miguel de Unamuno

Pessimism

Every evening we are poorer by a day.

--Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence

My god, how that man can cut right through your heart. I suppose there is an optimistic, or probably simply a more "rational," way to approach the situation he describes. Surely, one might say, we are a day richer in experience? (Maybe then we should tally up the bad and good days every evening, and keep a running score. Who would ever come out even, let alone on top?) How absurd.

No, the best response would be to say the premise is flawed, that to approach life from this sort of timeline perspective (Which, in fact, Schopenhauer does not do, preferring instead to approach it from the continual agony of an unending present moment. Not even death is an escape properly speaking. But let's stick with this quote for now) is ridiculous. But even were one to feel that a life lived in the present (another impossibility I think; we are always oriented toward the future with regard to our own possibilities of Being, we are bound to the timeline like a wheel of fire, with rare exceptions such as my inscrutable and never-to-be-explained philosophy of witnessing) is somehow worthwhile the response of Pessimism would be to think of that belief as a delusion bordering on insanity.

Where I come up short is whether it is really possible to judge this type of response as "valid" or whatever. I find most critical tools come up short in response to Pessimism, simply because it is irrational, or simply because it is dogmatic, I don't know. Bertrand Russell gets it right in simply stating that there is no more basis for a pessimistic philosophy than there is for an optimistic philosophy, since either presupposes erroneously that the universe is built to some purpose.

The Pessimist must, therefore, affirm just this irrational belief in a purpose. I think, contra Russell, that the idea that the universe is built to a purpose is not really irrational. In the sense that it exists for its own sake, it is to that purpose directed, and to that purpose we are chained: existence, our "mortal coil" is a prison from which there is no escape.

Consider the great Utopias written throughout history. It doesn't take much reflection to discover that each and every one of them is unbearable. Narratives of emancipation, in whatever form that emancipation takes, are in truth narratives of the emancipation from existence. Our happy endings are precisely that, endings. Unhappy endings imply precisely the continued prison of existence. (Tragedy occupies a third zone maybe).

There is one Utopian novel that proposes a viable solution. In fact, it is a dystopia, Brave New World. Let us numb ourselves with drugs and any and all distractions. Who's to judge? The fact is that the world Huxley presents is more appealing than all the real utopias could ever hope to be. Thus would life be bearable, but not for us, just our shadows.

Science can provide the solution. It really can, and we are on our way. Well, not precisely "we" since whatever beings will inhabit this planet after our unhappy sojourn here is over will not be "us" in any meaningful sense. The utopian world is not, and by definition cannot ever be, our own world.

I think, ultimately, the question of Pessimism rests on a pretty difficult question: What is the content of existence? Maybe it is contentless, as I suspect many modern philosophers would argue. Any inclination to assign an "essence" to existence would be seen as foolish at best, and reactionary at worst. If, for instance, one were to argue that life is simply suffering, this would betray a foundationalist bent that is unsupportable.

And so we are left in the rather curious position of being unable to say anything definitive about existence as such. In certain contingent circumstances, it is to be imagined that existence could even be a quite wonderful thing.

Something, I feel, is missing in this account, but I am not sure what yet. Perhaps it is the non-contingency of two factors: my simple existence (the foundation for contingencies) and my death. Are these, in fact, non-contingent? I don’t know. And I don’t think the matter is simple. The idea of an essentially contentless existence (thus an existence that derives its meaning from difference) seems to overlook the fact that existence almost continually strives for non-existence, in the many forms this would take. I can philosophize about my existence all I want, but I can’t make this headache go away. I feel stuck.

And so another day closes...

Jacques Derrida

At the end is a link to the best brief capsule of Derrida I have read yet, though have not read them all. I must say I have been astounded at the dearth of remembrance for a man who is not just an immensely important philosophic figure (no doubt one of the most important of the 20th century), but a man who also was tremendously influential on American life at all levels. Anyone who has had their eyes and ears open in American universities over the last 30+ years could not help but here the persistent echo of Derrida's '66 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." "Deconstruction" has even been popularized and appeared in the general discourse and in the popular arts.

I have encountered his fascinating, and more often frustratingly abstruse, work at almost every turn...even in that bulwark of American Philistine indifference, the law school. What was Derrida's impact on me intellectually? I am certain it is more than I know, just as I am certain that it is still sinking in. I have only begun to directly confront his work, and as a beginning it is most fair to say I have not yet begun!

I must say that the passing of Jacques Derrida has hit me rather hard and I cannot really put my finger on why. I suspect it is because I fear it is the beginning of a death much larger than this particular one, and I will leave the reader to guess what I feel has begun to breathe heavily in the face of its mortality with the passing of a great 20th century philosopher. In any case, here is the link...

http://chronicle.com/free/2004/10/2004101102n.htm

I have decided to include another I have just finished reading, much better than the first I think. Also I want to point out the quote it finishes on. It mentions a collections of eulogies that appeared in English under the title The Work of Mourning, but in French Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde...it translates, "Each time unique, the end of the world." How exceptionally beautiful!

http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1324460,00.html

Arendt Considering Nihilism

In the essay I am working on right now ("Thinking and Moral Considerations," which I will quote extensively from), Arendt addresses nihilism in two different instances. First, is the concern by the "defenders of metaphysics" of the "danger of nihilism" that arises through recent philosophical contributions by the likes of Nietzsche. In the second instance, she addresses the real possibility that "thinking" will coincide with nihilistic "knowledge." I believe these two instances relate back to each other, and they are helpful in understanding the interconnectedness and implications of her theories on thinking, willing and judging.

I do not plan on explaining Arendt's theory of "thinking" here, but I do plan soon on a large post on Thinking, Willing, and Judging, the tripartite division that was to organize her last work on the vita contemplativa in The Life of the Mind. Unfortunately she died before its completion and never got to the Judgment section, which was probably the most important of the three because it proposes a solution to the problem formed by the first two sections (and in my opinion by the Nietzsche and post-structuralism problems). Fortunately, for my sake, her theory of judgment can be well gathered by an intense study of several essays touching on the issue, but I will not go into that now either.

For the purposes of this post you need only know that "thinking," according to Arendt, is a purposeless activity, it does not aim at producing anything. In fact, "thinking" is inherently destructive and even self-destructive, because when one thinks, one is always thinking anew. Thinking challenges "concepts," which are described as knowledge or "thoughts frozen by language, the medium of thinking." So when I mentioned earlier that thinking can coincide with nihilism, it would be wrong to gather that thinking "produces" nihilism because thinking does not produce anything. Production of knowledge is what "knowing" does (based on a distinction b/w "knowing" and "thinking" Arendt believes she has found in Kant), and thinking is characterized by the act which challenges knowing or knowledge. Thinking is where we take prejudicial categories of knowledge and turn them around, question them, ultimately destroy them.

The first instance where Arendt discusses nihilism in "Thinking and Moral Considerations" is with regard to the end of the distinction between the sensual and supersensual worlds and their hierarchical ordering given in traditional metaphysics. She points to the "cries of the defenders of metaphysics," urging that the collapse of this distinction poses the threat of the onset of nihilism. Arendt suggests that their concerns are well placed because "once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearance...is also annihilated." Arendt then points out that nobody knew this better than Nietzsche.

For a perfect example of this collapse and its effect, one need not look further than Nietzsche's alleged assassination of God in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Arendt suggests this oft-quoted and misunderstood passage was later clarified by Nietzsche in The Twilight of Idols where he stated that "God" was used to symbolize the supersensual realm as understood by traditional metaphysics. In this instance Nietzsche uses the term "true world" instead of "God" (as in the true world of things-in-themselves versus the "world as it appears"), and Arendt quotes him saying, "We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one." The "death" of the "God" of traditional metaphysics does not affect "our ability to think" or "the sheer fact that man is a thinking being," it only means that the inclination to think does not need to be raised/confined by the traditional questions of metaphysics (as Kant believed). Unfortunately Arendt moves from here directly into another topic, and we are left momentarily unsatisfied with the fears of "the defenders of metaphysics."

The second instance can be related back to the first to complete a more satisfying picture of the existence of nihilism and its relationship to "thinking." In this section of the lecture Arendt has posed Socrates as the "example" of a thinker "thinking" (there is a role in "judgment" to be played by ideal types, examples or "exemplary thought" which will not be addressed here, one must only know that "example" has a specialized meaning). Socrates, like "thinking," does not propose results or truth. Socrates only incites reflection or thought as an activity of intrinsic value. We are reminded of the charges levied by the Athenians against Socrates for "corrupting the youth," etc., and of Socrates reply in the Apology. Socrates was guilty of challenging the traditional values of the city because thought is inherently destructive of received or unreflected categories, but Socrates never posed results as evidenced by the arguments in the dialogues, which are always "aporetic," either circular or without end. So what Socrates reveals is that "once roused from your sleep...you will see that you have nothing in your hand but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is share them with each other" ("each other," here may be the "me and myself" of the "thinking dialogue," it need not be "others" literally).

How does this destructive and purposeless activity possibly coincide with nihilism? Well, we can see for example certain members of Socrates circle, particularly Alcibiades and Critias, who, having been "aroused" by Socrates, "changed the nonresults of thinking into negative results." Alcibiades and Critias decide that since they cannot know what piety is, they shall be impious, and this is, by Arendt's account, "pretty much the opposite of what Socrates had hoped to achieve by talking about piety." We are warned that thinking, which "relentlessly dissolves and examines anew...doctrines and rules," can "turn against itself...produce a reversal of old values." See for instance Nietzsche, who seems to have forgotten while reversing Plato that "reversed Plato is still Plato." These negative results that coincide with the thinking activity will only serve to be the next set of dogmatically received values. Nihilism, according to Arendt, is simply the other side of conventionalism, negations of the current. Since thinking must go through a stage of at least hypothetical negation there is a tendency to try to "know" negated values, but "knowing" and "production" are not ends of thinking, which has no aim and is an end in itself.

What she seems to be suggesting here is not far off from Nietzche's criticism of "European Nihilism" in the first section of The Will to Power. Where nihilism is fallable, and inherently circular, is in its demand to hang to, or posit, ideas that exist only in relation to other ideas which it has recognized as destroyed. I am working from memory now, but I believe Nietzsche describes this as the person who denies values and then blames those very values for no longer existing, this is the error of nihilism. Nihilism always tries to hold to the shadows of things that it refuses to believe still exist.

This notion of nihilism relates to the Arendtian idea of "thinking," because thinking is supposed to be what is left when "values" can no longer be relied on (along with Willing and Judging). When thinking is blocked by "knowing" we reach an unreflective state where human beings simply apply, "sleepily," conventions or general rules to particulars with little regard for their substance. Its the "having a rule" that matters, and this explains why it is so easy to "transvaluate" or replace old rules with new rules. The flaw is in relying exclusively on concepts or rules, "determinative judgment" as Kant called it, in getting too used to "never making up [one's] mind." Nihilism is, as I believe Arendt would suggest, still holding to this flawed methodology but inverting, altering, or exploiting its arbitrary or contingent substance (she is relying heavily on Nietzsche here I think).

In conclusion, it appears the nihilistic threat posed by the collapse of the two-world metaphysics of traditional philosophy is rooted in this need for new categories. The collapse should have introduced the slippery nature of categories, the reality that concepts tend to "move about." Instead, it has simply led to a grasping for a new set of slippery concepts to hold to, since it is this "holding to" that really matters to most people. To Arendt, I think, the collapse of the two-world metaphysics did not demonstrate the flaw of this knowledge but the flaw of knowing itself. "What has remained?" asks Nietzsche. Arendt would perhaps answer "thinking, willing, and judging." I am not well acquainted with nihilism beyond Nietzsche's criticism of it and Arendt here, which I believe to be closely related to Nietzsche. I would be interested in knowing what those of you more acquainted with nihilism think since it will help my organization of Arendt for research purposes.