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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, March 10, 2003
Following on from his review of Dennett's Freedom Evolves that I commented on recently, the ubquitous John Gray has now written a review of a new Nietszche biography. As it happens, I'm a little more sympathetic to Gray on this occasion. In particular, I think many of his observations astute, if rarely original; "Rather, Nietzsche's troubled meditations on truth - he oscillated between denying that it could ever be known and seeing it as the destroyer of humanity's most cherished illusions ... If his writings abound in contradictions, it is not because he was unaware of them, but rather that, believing truth in many areas of philosophical inquiry to be inherently paradoxical, he had no interest in system-building." Or to put it more succintly; Nietzsche is best regarded as a writer of literature than of philosophy.
But, leaving generosity aside, Gray does remorsely continue to apply the same formulae he was inflicting on Dennett; namely, that Nietzsche was seeking a viable alternative to christianity but was never quite able to shrug off the influence of his christian upbringing. Generally speaking, if one goes in search of ambiguity in Nietzsche then one will typically find it, but I'm not really persuaded that Gray makes an especially convincing case. The crux of Gray's case is that Nietzsche wished to hold on to an essentially Christian view of the human subject while dropping the transcendental beliefs that alone support it. There is some truth to this, but Gray is assuming that the Christian view of the subject was homogenous; for much of the time the Christian view rested upon the same principles of annhiliation of the self as did the Buddhism that Gray states was intolerable to Nietzsche. In fact, Nietzsche remained ambivalent towards Buddhism, but his reason for rejecting Schopenhauer's advocacy of the death of the self, was that such doctrines were predicated on the same kind of abnegation of will that reinforced the christian doctrine of the meek inheriting the Earth. In other words, the split from Schopenhauer was precisely because he had not rejected christianity enough, not because he had gone too far. The argument that Zarathrustra is a Jesus-like redemptive figure is suggestive but rests on analogy alone; for example, one could suggest Aeneas as being a similarly redemptive figure.
posted by Richard 5:10 pm
