Danto Nietzsche Flashcards
ressentiment, since we blame our suffering on karmic
pollutions we ourselves are responsible for
Kant, the other dominant anticonsequentialist, has a metaphysics of morals, in which it is true that an effort is made to derive
our duties from our being, except that it construes derivation itself to be our characterise form of action and our essence itself to be reason, and so entraps an opponent as a confirmer, since denial too exemplifies rationality
if you are Nietzsche you don’t deny you
reject
the aphorism has complex pragmatics, since it at once used and used to demonstrate what it means
to use language in this way…
language must implant itself in the reader, and wisdom comes from an experience used in a way to bypass
the faculties used in normal reading
not examining his views on language but
his use of language
the psychology of metaphorical address, since metaphor is a rhetoricians device, is that the audience will itself supply the connection withheld
by the metaphor, so that the rhetorician opens a kind of gap with intension that the logical energies of his audience will arc it, with the consequence of having participated in the progression of argument, that audience convinces itself
the whole great second essay of the Genealogy is precisely addressed to the role of pain
and the forging of memory
forgetting is a dimension
of animal health
consciousness in which attention and memory or memorability coincide
is contrary to the animal nature and possibly even a sort of disease
Nietzsche is speaking of what we might call deep forgetfulness here, a complete metabolisation
of experience rather than the repressive forgetfulness that Freud’s later concept of the Unconscious introduces into mental economy
“if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never
ceases hurting stays in the memory”
We still talk of teaching someone a lesson as a synonym for administering a beating; we still say
“this will learn you” as we land a punch
the entire office of religion has taught us that our moral
suffering has meaning, so that the chosen people spontaneously turns to its prophets to explain what lesson it is being taught through the suffering it has come to accept as the avenue of communication
aphorism and pain are
internally related
aphoristic form is prophylactic against
forgetfulness and since pain is the prime reinforcer of retention, aphorism and pain are internally linked
in its form spontaneously presents itself to a writer whose warrior violence must be turned against
those he appears to admire: the healthy forgetters, the innocent brutes
he is being disingenuous when he inveighs against asceticism while using language specifically
framed to scourge
someone who uses ascetic practices to kill
asceticism is engaged in a very complex communication, supposing his is coherent at all, and he would be right that we are missing what is taking place when we merely read the words
it is as though the entirety of the Genealogy is a cell of inflictions
and instruments of ascetic transformations and a very rough book
almost impossible to read without being
cut to ribbons
for how is one meant to forget what he wrote about
Jews, slaves, justice, seriousness; about barbarism, morality itself, sensuality, torture, cruelty
English moral psychologists whose interest for us in part lies in the fact that they have written
uninteresting books, the question is why have they written uninteresting books- “what do they really want?”
To treat the Genealogy as though it were precocious analytical philosophy is to have swallowed a bait
without having yet felt the hook
I want to calm that the Genealogy is in this respect a medical book: etiological, diagnostic, therapeutic, prognostic.
I want to underscore therapeutic here, for the book is not for other practitioners of the caring art so much as it is for those who suffer from the diseases it addresses
the intended reader is sick,
if typically in ways unrecognised by him: one learns the nature if one’s illnesses as one reads a book
aphorism is so suitable a form is that the language has to get past the defences we bring to the book since
the defences are in a way part of the disease, as in neurosis (…) where the repression of the pathogen is part of the pathogen
so the reader is being treated
as he reads, and a condition of therapeutic success is that he kept continuously conscious of the disorder the book means to drive out
there is an analogy to Socratic maieutic, here the point being that only the sufferer can
solve the problem of his suffering, the doctor’s role consisting in showing him that he is sick
The physiologicalisation of moral concepts, the proposal that in the end moral differences must be psychological differences, or that a certain physiognomical paradigm must be a paradigm of health
all other variants of being sick, are amongst the most reckless and dangerous conjectures
but the shock of Darwinism was still being felt, and he was not immune to the moralisation of natural selection
that almost defines nineteenth century thought, which can lead to the view, as we know, that those with different moral beliefs may be contagious, ought to be segregated at least and at worst may have to be eliminated in the interests of moral sepsis
those who are physiologically distinctive, must fall under a different moral order
and need not be treated in the way we treat one another
Nietzsche’s thesis, it is this: the main suffering human beings have been subject to throughout history are due to certain interpretative responses to the fact of extensional suffering.
it is not clear that Nietzsche believes he can deal with extensional suffering. but he can deal with intensional suffering, thus helping reduce, often by significant factor, the total suffering of the world
while extensional suffering is bad enough, often it is many times compounded by our interpretations of it,
themselves often far worse than the disorder itself
complex ideas connected with the male self image of adequacy and power, and extreme vulnerability in the male ego which sexual incapacity opens up.
it can lead, it has led, to suicide, depression, despair, divorce.
the disorders addressed by this book and which it is his enterprise to help us cure ourselves of, are
interpretations of suffering which themselves generate suffering
any sufferings due to false moral beliefs about ourselves is due to bad consciousness, when
there is nothing bad about us except our bad consciousness of being bad
resentment must also be in some state or another- in his scheme, of actual pathological suffering, for what resentment (…)
amounts to is a certain sort of interpretive explanation of suffering in the mind of the sufferer
in actual fact it would not matter if the suffering in question were real, that is, pathological, or only believed in to be real, as in some cases of what used
to be called hysteria.
a priori suffering:
“every sufferer seeks a cause for his suffering; more exactly an agent…anaesthesia- the narcotic he cannot help desiring to deaden pain of every kind”
sufferers tend to moralise suffering by holding
someone responsible for it: as though mere suffering, undeserved only in the sense that it makes no sense to speak of it as deserved, is simply unintelligible
“the actual physiological cause of resentment, vengefulness and the like” could easily have formed a section
in the Hippocratic collection
“why me Lord?” is the spontaneous response to sickness
“what did I do to deserve this?”
“what did I do to deserve this” as though there were in every instance a
sentence of some sort
as is the case for Job, whose classic posture is exactly that of resentment in this form
since he can see no reason why God should be causing him to suffer
[job] even if he did feel he deserved the build and losses, this would
still be a case of ressentiment because he moralised his suffering
Religion, save the rather rare case of Job, abolishes all possibility of resentment, since in fact it depends upon it for
existence: for what does religion do except teach us that the suffering we endure we also deserve
religion redirects ressentiment (…) by making the
patient the very agent he seeks informing us that we brought it on our selves
that is blaming jews, or blaming the bourgeoisie for all social ills, rather than looking more deeply into the social structure for
proper etiology, parallel the classic forms of the a priori of affect
suffering really is meaningless, there is no point to it
and the amount of suffering caused by giving it a meaning chills the blood to contemplate
what Nietzsche objects to is making every suffering a munition and the entire world a court
of justice with a penitentiary annex
restate the instinct of ressentiment: man would rather his suffering be meaningful, hence would rather will meaning to it
than acquiesce in the meaninglessness of it
it goes against this instinct to believe what is essentially the most liberating thought imaginable
that life is without meaning
in order to accept the consolations of religion, the dubious gift of meaning as it were, one must accept the
anthropology which alone makes religion applicable in the first place, namely that they are weak, defective and almost defined through our propensity to suffer
with religion in general, the salvation is often from suffering we would not know we had were
it not revealed suffering, by means we again would not understand but for revelation
who would know we were contaminated by original sin, for instance, that we need to be saved
from it, and that the means whereby this might be achieved is if God took on a form whereby he might purge our suffering through his?
Nietzsche applauds in the blonde beasts than their absolute
freedom from meaning. They live as he says in his early book on history, as beasts do “in happy blindness between walls of the past and the future”
Human existence by deep contrast [to beasts] is ‘Ann imperfect tense that never becomes present”
the philosophy of life that robs life of happiness, since the latter seeks perennially the significance of events it would be happiness instead merely to forget or, next best, to take as they came, at a kind of absolute magnitude without forming a kind of text
it is a rock against which history as significance must shatter, especially religious history,
the history of the fall, covenant, sin, redemption, trial, judgement, and hell, where it is an unrelieved anxiety as to where we stand and what we can hope
God did not die in order that something else should take his place: rather
he meant for the place to die with the occupant
it is an unconcern with goals which imposes a program of choices on life
where the depend on schemes of meaning
it is not so much the extrication of the will as its reeducation and redirection: its return to the
goals of simply normal life
he complains of terrible headaches, nausea, stomach ache: he was afflicted by the cold, the damp, bad food, and of course a sense of isolation and unrecognition (…)
he did not suffer, however, in the way which truncate the lives they are supposed to redeem
if we were to subtract all the intensional suffering from the history of our century, we would subtract
the history of the century
what Nietzsche would like to have achieved: to subtract all those schemes of disvaluation of the present by reference to an inflated valuation of the future; to make the world a place we live rather
than a place we pass through to some higher state; to restore the present to the present; to replace morality of principle; to act in such a way as to be consistent with acting that way eternally; to stultify the instinct for significance
this is the posture of unconcern, and while it is unclear that it would make us altogether happy, it is perfectly plain that it erases
most of what has made for human unhappiness through history: the martyrdoms, the crucifixions, the eggs cracked in the name of political omelettes, man as a means
not surprisingly it is the only view consistent with human dignity, the only view of humans as an end
