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[The following is a letter written to
a Chinese woman here in Taipei, a Christian graduate student in philosophy.]
Dear ... :
Hui-Ling said that your recent
study of Nietzsche has caused you to rethink certain things. I hope you haven't
taken Nietzsche's work too seriously. This may seem like a ridiculous
statement, I know, as Nietzsche is certainly one of the major modern European
minds. How is one not to take him seriously?
I often think of a remark that
Simone Weil made of Nietzsche's writing, that she felt an almost physical
revulsion to it. And yet Nietzsche excels as a writer, he is a giant, he has
perhaps done more for our aphoristic style than any other modern writer.
It is a question here of two
personalities, two different affective manners of experiencing the world.
Nietzsche and Weil have so very little in common with each other that Weil
cannot bring herself to find the sympathy necessary to read Nietzsche for long.
I picture her closing the book, near to throwing it against the wall.
I think of Nietzsche as being
one of the most incisive of thinkers, and yet there is a problem with his
incisiveness. The word incisive is related to incision, which is a matter of
cutting, as with a scalpel. I think of Nietzsche as all scalpel, as if there
were no hand there to guide the scalpel's cutting, as if thought itself were a
matter of ever more cutting, never a matter of listening to what one's language
says. Or rather, what one's language says is always analyzed for what may be
used in service to yet further cutting.
Nietzsche is the most violent
of thinkers. Ultimately, in my understanding, he is a kind of madman victimized
by his very incisiveness, a man extraordinarily developed in a certain range
but lacking a nerve in some other, more important area. I have always used the
metaphor of deafness to characterize Nietzsche. When I read him, I feel there
is a certain deafness, an almost palpable deafness, as if Nietzsche were locked
in a glass ball. This is to say that in a certain register Nietzsche, that
towering critical genius, ultimately seems very small.
I don't know what you are
reacting to in Nietzsche. You are a philosophy PhD. candidate, and now
doubtless know European philosophy better than I. Given certain preconceptions
and social conditions, perhaps the preconceptions and conditions made possible
by the eighteenth century, Nietzsche's philosophy of revaluation, his attack on
the culture of ressentiment, becomes one of the most viable philosophical stances. And yet
I do not share those particular preconceptions, and I do not think the world is
such that God is dead. I think, rather, that the world is dead, that the world
has defaulted.
Write me if you would like to
summarize the place Nietzsche has taken in your thinking. I'd be interested.
Eric
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Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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This page
is at http://www.necessaryprose.com/
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