Dewey and Nietzsche
Recently I was discussing with a friend how I have long been interested in the relationship between American Pragmatism, Dewey in particular,and Nietzsche. Some of you will remember back in college when I had, what History will remember as, my "Lear Episode." At once that play, coupled of course with my life at the time, helped to rupture any illusion that "the loyalties which once held me" had any relationship whatsoever to objective reality. The assumption that these objects of loyalty do arise directly out of the world gave them a sort of permanence or stability, a permanence whose existence one ought not question as "understanding" so prudently teaches us. The Lear Episode allowed me to realize, as Nietzsche so beautifully put it in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (quoted from memory), that these "truths" I had clung so loyally to, had no real correlation to the world of being, that they were merely conceptual webs "spun delicately like a spider's web, flexible enough to be carried freely along the tumultous currents, but strong enough not to be blown apart by the gentl'st breeze."
Well, to put it squarely, King Lear, like life itself, is no gentle breeze, and once my web had been sufficiently destroyed I began to look frantically for something new to hold to (fortunately I was suffering from the most tortuous insomnia at the time which allowed me long spells of solitude to consume consolation from my vibrant German friend Nietzsche). I turned first to Nietzsche, in whom I found a healthy companion piece to Shakespeare and a deadly assassin to the "European Nihilism" that rode in on the heels of my awakening and threatened to lull me back into a circular sleep. Perhaps I would have enjoyed a more pleasant slumber (literally and figuratively!), but "for those of us to whom wakefulness is our task..."
In any case, Nietzsche was not forthcoming with a satisfying answer, although he was chock full of compelling questions, so I began a more sober turn for a guide to the "lived experience" (and anyway it is Nietzsche's counsel in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to "remain faithful to the earth"). Ultimately, via existentialism (particularly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Ryan White!), I found my way to pragmatism, and in that most fertile and American of philosophies I began to sense a way out. This has proceeded most fruitfully through Arendt, and I will not fully discuss it now because "what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence"(Wittgenstein).
At this point I will give an extended quote by John Dewey that I think well describes the problem, which is covered to an exhausting extent in Nietzsche's most urgent works, and most beautifully and frighteningly in the culmination of Lear that sees the King disrobed and open to the elements (Nietzsche is the philosophical "disrobing" of the West, and at once we are asked to laugh and dance in the spaces he has torn asunder...both him and Lear end up insane!).
J. Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930)
*These "two views" he alludes to refer to a cursory argument from a previous paragraph about whether it is the powerful few or the disempowered many whose individuality is most threatened by modern society. It is, as he says, irrelevant for the rest of the passage, but I included the sentence because it introduces the idea of "the lost individual," which is important and closely related to the many ways Nietzsche characterized such a state...one of which was "European Nihilism."
I wish I had some of my Nietzsche with me to draw a closer parallel with text, but to those of you who have spent a little time with Nietzsche you will clearly see the similarities. I am certain I could find an extended quote in The Will To Power, Between Good and Evil, and On the Geneology of Morals that would be substantially indistinct from the Dewey quote above.
Quickly, I like Dewey's line about drifting "without sure anchorage," but I urge that this is not a new phenomenon. These things have always been adrift, as the earlier quote from Nietzsche suggests, upon a linguistic web that has been drifting and floating since its very birth. So long as we relate to the world through thought, and thought through language, we will always be adrift because this is the very nature of language. The apparent stability of language is deceptive and relative, and whats worse is that its point of relation is itself, so it is also circular! In any case, what gives the appearance of a recent "setting into motion" is that the former drifting edifice seemed stable in relation to us because we were adrift upon it. We looked at a stable and unmoving "world" because we were conflating the "world" with that drifting vessel upon which we stood. It was only once we looked over the sides of that mighty, yet delicate, ship that we first saw the dizzying and flux spaciousness of "world." It was only when the first fool among us dared to jump overboard that we caught a fleeing glance of the "motioness" of our ship. So one says, "Dear God, it appears the anchor has been lost!" My answer to this brave fool is, "My friend, I fear we may have been misled altogether of the existence of an anchor from the beginning..."
And new philosophy calls in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his antinomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation...
John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World," Lns. 205-214
Well, to put it squarely, King Lear, like life itself, is no gentle breeze, and once my web had been sufficiently destroyed I began to look frantically for something new to hold to (fortunately I was suffering from the most tortuous insomnia at the time which allowed me long spells of solitude to consume consolation from my vibrant German friend Nietzsche). I turned first to Nietzsche, in whom I found a healthy companion piece to Shakespeare and a deadly assassin to the "European Nihilism" that rode in on the heels of my awakening and threatened to lull me back into a circular sleep. Perhaps I would have enjoyed a more pleasant slumber (literally and figuratively!), but "for those of us to whom wakefulness is our task..."
In any case, Nietzsche was not forthcoming with a satisfying answer, although he was chock full of compelling questions, so I began a more sober turn for a guide to the "lived experience" (and anyway it is Nietzsche's counsel in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to "remain faithful to the earth"). Ultimately, via existentialism (particularly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Ryan White!), I found my way to pragmatism, and in that most fertile and American of philosophies I began to sense a way out. This has proceeded most fruitfully through Arendt, and I will not fully discuss it now because "what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence"(Wittgenstein).
At this point I will give an extended quote by John Dewey that I think well describes the problem, which is covered to an exhausting extent in Nietzsche's most urgent works, and most beautifully and frighteningly in the culmination of Lear that sees the King disrobed and open to the elements (Nietzsche is the philosophical "disrobing" of the West, and at once we are asked to laugh and dance in the spaces he has torn asunder...both him and Lear end up insane!).
"What here is meant by 'the lost individual' is, however, so irrelevant to this question that it is not necessary to decide between the two views.* For by it is meant a moral and intellectual fact which is independent of any manifestation of power in action. The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as the present. Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. There are, of course, those who are still militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed. But their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them. For others, traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or are openly repudiated, and they drift without sure anchorage. Individuals vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and emotion."
J. Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930)
*These "two views" he alludes to refer to a cursory argument from a previous paragraph about whether it is the powerful few or the disempowered many whose individuality is most threatened by modern society. It is, as he says, irrelevant for the rest of the passage, but I included the sentence because it introduces the idea of "the lost individual," which is important and closely related to the many ways Nietzsche characterized such a state...one of which was "European Nihilism."
I wish I had some of my Nietzsche with me to draw a closer parallel with text, but to those of you who have spent a little time with Nietzsche you will clearly see the similarities. I am certain I could find an extended quote in The Will To Power, Between Good and Evil, and On the Geneology of Morals that would be substantially indistinct from the Dewey quote above.
Quickly, I like Dewey's line about drifting "without sure anchorage," but I urge that this is not a new phenomenon. These things have always been adrift, as the earlier quote from Nietzsche suggests, upon a linguistic web that has been drifting and floating since its very birth. So long as we relate to the world through thought, and thought through language, we will always be adrift because this is the very nature of language. The apparent stability of language is deceptive and relative, and whats worse is that its point of relation is itself, so it is also circular! In any case, what gives the appearance of a recent "setting into motion" is that the former drifting edifice seemed stable in relation to us because we were adrift upon it. We looked at a stable and unmoving "world" because we were conflating the "world" with that drifting vessel upon which we stood. It was only once we looked over the sides of that mighty, yet delicate, ship that we first saw the dizzying and flux spaciousness of "world." It was only when the first fool among us dared to jump overboard that we caught a fleeing glance of the "motioness" of our ship. So one says, "Dear God, it appears the anchor has been lost!" My answer to this brave fool is, "My friend, I fear we may have been misled altogether of the existence of an anchor from the beginning..."
And new philosophy calls in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his antinomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation...
John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World," Lns. 205-214
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