The Postmodern Nietzsche
What does postmodernism make of Nietzsche? Do they morph him to something out of context? Or does it end up being more faithful than faithful to the ground breaking philosopher/proto-psychologist?
This is a take-off from @Joshs and his comments about the postmodern will-to-power.
Where would one start to answer this?
This is a take-off from @Joshs and his comments about the postmodern will-to-power.
Where would one start to answer this?
Comments (39)
Hi! I hope you don't mind if I moved this over here. I'll need to chew on this a while.
This doesn't really make any sense. Maybe postmodernism just isn't for me?
Nietzsche, what he did was inform us of God's demise; religion was just another way absolute truth manifested itself.
Enlightenment, post-Deus?
[quote=Daniel Bonevac]Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.[/quote]
As far as I can tell, purveyors of p0m0 reduce N to his "there are no facts, only interpretations" (which, ontologically generalized out-of-context, entails(?) some sort of pan-aestheticism after N's so-called "the death of metaphysics" and "psychosocial deflation of morality"). For p0m0, it seems only caricatures subjective interpretations of N (or any text) are deemed "significant" :eyes:
Yes. They deny (without philological scruple) 'authorial intent', so N is every reader's "N", that is, whatever each reader (milieu?) can make of "N". In practice, p0m0 readings "transvaluate" him (any text) into a rorschach-like "signifier" :mask:
:clap: :lol:
[quote=John Keats (Ode to a Grecian urn)]Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.[/quote]
Muchas gracias 3017amen (banned)!
:chin:
[quote=180 Proof]there are no facts, only interpretations[/quote]
I was close then.
Not caricatures, characterizations, which is all any interpreter can come up with. The key questions, as far as Im concerned , do not have to do with capturing the real Nietzsche, any more than we can capture the real Plato. Of course we can do our best , but readings will always vary by era and social context.
To me that two key questions are: 1)What is the most daring and interesting reading of Nietzsche , the one that pushes him to his radical edge? 2) Whether or not we think this most radical reading is consistent with the authors text, can we at least understand its assertions on its own terms?
I dont get the impresssion that you succeed at #2, which does t put you in an ideal position to judge whether postmodern readings of Nietzsche , like those of Foucault, Deleuze, Rouse, Derrida and Heidegger, are simply reductive caricatures or in fact reveal what makes him so different from contemporaries like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.
If the most daring and (to your mind) interesting readings of Nietzsche do not have to be consistent with Nietzsche's text, then are they still readings of Nietzsche and not misreadings? If the assertions are to be understood on their own terms, and these assertions are not consistent with Nietzsche's text, then is what sense, if any, are they still assertions about Nietzsche's text?
Schopenhauer wasn't his contemporary. He was about two generations back, and people who are familiar with both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche note how similar they are in spite of apparently being unaware of one another.
I'd just say that if you knowingly get creative with Nietzsche, you're not in a position to dismiss other interpretations. You'll just have to respect everyone else's view. Do you agree?
Quoting Tate
I meant that the ideas were contemporary , not that the writers were born in the same era. I consider Heideggers ideas contemporary even though he was born in 1889.
It is vital to postmodern readings of Nietzsche to recognize the critical distance between his thinking and Kierkegaards. Existentialist readings of Nietzsche, on the other hand, see the two as compatible. I would be very disappointed if I became conscience that Nietzsche wasnt saying anything remarkably different than Kierkegaard. My favorite thing about Nietzsche is how he slams a hammer into the religiosity that Kierkegaard struggles to keep alive.
Quoting Tate
My point was everybody gets creative with philosophers they are charged with interpreting, but only some admit it. Others may buy into some form of realism that tries to lock in a true for all reading of a set of philosophical ideas, and dont even have framework within which it makes sense to point out the cultural relativism implicit in understanding ideas.
So knowingly or not, we must respect others readings.( I would say the same about divergent theoretical viewpoints within the social sciences) But that doesnt mean we dont have a preference for one reading over another, and that there arent important ethical and psychological implications of one preference vs another.
I didnt mean to suggest that a reading of an author shouldnt strive to be as consistent as humanly possible with their text. My point was that even the most scholarly rigorous reading of an author , one which seeks nothing other than to capture without distortion the authors original intent, will be oriented by implicit cultural presuppositions , much like the attempt to capture the original way that Bach sounded. There are numerous intellectual cultures operating simultaneously today, which is why there are such diametrically opposed readings of Nietzsche.
A "scholarly rigorous reading" and "the most daring and interesting reading of Nietzsche , the one that pushes him to his radical edge" are two different things. Being historically situated is not a choice, but what you take to be the most interesting reading is a deliberate choice.
Kierkegaard's point was that Christianity is a dead religion. I think you've gone way too long not understanding Kierkegaard and how he was saying the same thing Nietzsche was vis-a-vis amor fati.
Could you say something about the postmodern Nietzsche? Like what does Derrida say about him? If that seems unutterably lazy on my part, sorry :grimace:
They are not necessarily two different things. In this context, a reading is daring and interesting not because it entertains as fiction , but on the contrary , because it resists the easiest, most conventional interpretation in favor of one that pushes and dares the interpreter. When referred to pushing Nietzsche to his radical edge , I meant, of the many Nietzsches one could choose to adopt as the true Nietzsche, all of which can be linked to solid evidence from his work, one should choose the most radical. We see this happen all the time in interpretive scholarship. Dreyfus reading of Heidegger and Husserl has been dumped in favor of more radical approaches, Hackers Wittgenstein has been replaced for many by Cavells and Conants, etc.
I read Kierkegaard through people like Caputo , Sheehan and Critchley, who may have abandoned Christianity but certainly not God and faith in the coherence of the concept of moral good(which amount to the same thing). Is this your view of Kierkegaard?
He doesn't use the concepts of God and faith in a conventional way. Those things are in the background to me. It's what he was saying that's amazing, and in some ways not just compatible, but the same as Nietzsche's view.
But if their presence in the background bothers you, I can see why you'd be turned off by him. It doesn't bother me. Since Nietzsche believed truth is always metaphorical and mythological, I doubt it would have bothered him either. He wasn't really the champion of atheism some make him out to be.
Why?
My preference, and it comes down to a matter of preference, is for the interpretation that helps us understand the text, attending to the details and connecting them, illuminating the whole of the text or texts of the author.
An appropriately "radical" one would be one that gets to the roots, not one that pushes it to the edge.
Quoting Joshs
This can become a matter of an uncritical preference for the new and novel. Cavell's and Conant's work is no longer new. It seems likely that some will see this as good reason to dump them in favor of something less conventional. An interpretation may benefit from the work of earlier interpreters, but there is the danger of interpreters focusing on earlier interpretations moving further away from the text itself with each iteration.
So there's no one Heidegger, but there's one Dreyfus's Heidegger, to be dumped. There's no one Wittgenstein, but there's one Hacker's Wittgenstein, to be replaced. Can Dreyfus and Hacker not be interpreted in daring and radical ways?
A couple of strong themes in Nietzsche work against the arbitrary quality of narratives suggested here.
The genealogy of morals may not make them necessary in a proof by means of universal law but does claim the logic of reproduction. The children reflect the parents. You come from a place.
The use of the idea of perspective to differentiate expressions is not an abandonment of objective criteria. One could object that it is too much of the opposite of that. The locations have a relationship to each other that becomes more determined than the ones who call out from those places. As a philologist, Nietzsche sees the words as prior to the speaker unless proven otherwise.
Quoting Fooloso4
:100:
No doubt. And you're entitled to your subjective interpretation (i.e. "characterization") of my own. In p0m0, after all, everybody's esteem gets stroked with a "gold star for attendance". :smirk:
:up:
To be fair, Nietzsches self-obscurantist style doesnt help him much.
You need to read better translations or Freddy's lyrical German prose. Artie's writings are less lyrical German composed in a Humean style but, IMO, they possess no greater clarity or expressive power than Freddy''s; however, they have the advantage of being more explicitly, or closely, reasoned than Freddy's aphoristic & essayistic works. If you don't read German, very good English translations are indepensible.
Yet, Cioran, written in aphorisms and French and Romanian mostly clear and clever. Both considered existential in some way. Why is Cioran more interesting and funny to me? Nietzsche has some good zingers but meh. Ubermensch seems silly to me and ripe for misinterpretation because he made it obscurantist. Its not as clear as clear Pepsi.
After PoMo and its multiplicity we can presumably move on to the complete liberation of primal screaming. :up:
Isn't that how we ended up with Trump?
Quoting Tom Storm
Yep. The first p0m0 president; maybe not the last.
I like to think that Trump is all about showing that societys losers can be its winners. The rational social order can be inverted so that all those annoying eggheads with their complicated syntax can be revealed as societys true fools.
This was also the pragmatist game. Commonsense should win out over fanciful abstractions. Rationality shut by itself in a room does seem to wind up speaking elaborate and unworldly nonsense. Think logical atomism. So there is a target to be had.
But Trumpism swings past the pragmatic correction to put the power in the hands of sophistry. It employs reason as a way to justify whatever needs justifying. It is rational discourse makes the pragmatic evidence fit a conspiracy theory.
So it says it is fine to undermine any proper standards of pragmatic discourse - that always delicate balance of theory and test. You dont have to win that game. You can lose and yet claim to have won.
Losers outweigh winners anyway. So losing is now winning. Any lie can be believed, or claim to be believed, as it pragmatically achieves its social/economic/political purpose.
Can we blame PoMo for eroding the pragmatic standards of philosophical discourse. Damn tooting!
It replaced all interpretations are allowable as abductive hypotheses with all interpretations are legitimate as actual theories.
At least conspiracy theories attempt to claim strong evidence standards. For PoMo, subjective feels are all that are required.
(This is of course a caricature. When actual PoMo texts aspire to rational discourse, the standard socialised mistake they make is to discover the dialectic at the centre of every metaphysical debate and huff, well if two opposites can both be true, then nothing can actually be considered the stable truth.
AP and PoMo both cant deal with the dialectical unity of opposites. One is repulsed by the acceptance of a contradiction and rejects it as being rational. The other turns it into the free play of paradox. Contradiction becomes embraced so warmly as to be unversalised as multiplicity.)
Getting back to Trump, isnt his genius that he doesnt even make an effort to fill in the blanks of his sophist arguments. He just puts the idea that needs justification out into the public sphere and demands folk find the justification.
Thats a true CEO for you. Put out the bullshit vision statement and let the eager underlings fall all over themselves getting it to stack up.
(I guess Im saying that is how I feel about having to make sense of any PoMo text too. Some kind of hazy but grandiose vision statement gets made, on no particular evidence or well constructed basis. You just have a lot of verbiage about how this can also be inverted to become its diametric opposite, and so well you fill in the blanks for me, dear reader. How is thesis and antithesis resolved to synthesis here. Find your own sense of what I could have meant.)
Agree. He's like an empty vessel that has been filled with the hemorrhaging resentments and dissatisfactions of American cultural life.
Quoting apokrisis
:fire:
When we interpret a text, or model the origins of the universe, are we attempting to represent or to construct truth? If both , how does the fact-value entanglement situate the knower and the known?
I follow McDowell, Brandom and Sellars beyond realism and anti-realism. And I also follow Joseph Rouse in viewing the investigation of the meaning of a text or the origin of a universe not as the recovery of what was but as. a moving further and further away from
what was in order to understand it better and better.
In other words, getting closer and closer to the roots involves ensconcing the past within more and more intricate schemes of relation that express what is relevant to current concerns and goals.
I do not think that interpreting a text is like modeling the origins of the universe. The former addresses the audience the latter does not. I do not regard interpretation of a text as either representing or constructing truth, but rather as opening up what is there to be found. But, of course, what is found is often what the interpreter, either deliberately or not, puts there. This may be of value or not, and whether it is the one or the other depends, at least in part, on what one wants from the text.
There is a sense in which we are always at a distance from the text. Such a vantage point does not in itself help us to understand it better. From a distance some things may come into focus but others may no longer be seen.
So too, current concerns and goals can get in the way of understanding the concerns and goals of the author. In my opinion an author who is at a distance from us in time and place may have something to teach us that our contemporaries cannot. The fact that they saw things differently can be of value.
:up:
An excellent summary of your considered attitude and practice to a close reading of any text.
Sprinkled throughout many discussions in a most helpful teaching/learning process. Thanks.
Could you elaborate on the difference between addressing an audience in textual interpretation and not addressing an audience in modeling the origin of the universe? Doesnt one participate within a set of scientific practices and address a particular community of fellow scientists when constructing theory? Do we not find what we put there in doing science? That is , we discover from within a web of practices and devices that produce not just the means but the substrate of what is to be found.
Quoting Fooloso4
In modernist thinking ones current goals and concerns act as a distortion of the texts authors original aims, and one should try ones best to separate these, so as to appreciate the different way an older author saw things with as little contamination from our overlaid experiences as possible. But arent the authors original aims also interpreted via ones current goals and aims? This is called the hermeneutic circle, which Heidegger discusses in Being and Time.
Scientific proof must not already presuppose what its task is to found. But if interpretation always already has
to operate within what is understood and nurture itself from this, how should it then produce scientific results without going in a circle, especially when the presupposed understanding still operates in the common knowledge of human being and world? But according to the most elementary rules of logic, the circle is a circulus vitios'lis. But the business of historical interpretation is thus banned a priori from the realm of exact knowledge. If the fact of the circle in understanding is not removed, historiography must be content with less strict possibilities of knowledge. It would be more ideal, of course, moreover according to the opinion of the historiographers themselves, if the circle could be avoided and if there were the hope for once of creating a historiography which is· as independent of the standpoint of the observer as the knowledge of nature is supposed to be.
But to see a vitiosum in this circle and to look for ways to avoid it, even to"feel" that is an inevitable imperfection, is to misunderstand understanding from the ground up .
What is decisive is not to get out of
the circle, but to get in it in the right way.
I meant the text itself addressing an audience.
Quoting Joshs
Gadamer talks about the fusion of horizons.
What should not be overlooked is the influence of Heidegger on scholars like Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein. Their reading of Plato stands in stark contrast to the prevailing interpretations at that time.
Since the OP concerns the postmodern, I thought Id mention Shaun Gallaghers interesting paper, Conversations in Postmodern Hermeneutics , in which he tries to steer a course between Gadamers approach and Lyotards paralogy.
A postmodern hermeneutics would be one that is free from the Romantic conceptions of humanity
and trust.
Lyotard's distrust of metalepsis indicates that in postmodern hermeneutics the fusion of horizons which would efface the differences between the self and the other must be displaced by a conception of linking that includes the impossibility of complete fusion, along with
the possibility of an agonistic refusal to be fused, as well as the possibility of progressive dialogue.
Metalepsis is the transformation of an observer left outside the conversation into a participant through his judgment about the conversation. When Socrates speaks to Thrasymachus, Plato intends for the reader to enter into the same conversation. We enter into the conversation, Gadamer would contend, through this metalepsis in which we judge whether Socrates or
Thrasymachus is right. For Gadamer, every time one reads Plato one enters into a conversation that is fused with the Socratic dialogue. Lyotard, in contrast, equates metalepsis with an absorption of the difference that exists between agonistics (debate) and dialogue, two
incommensurable genres. For Lyotard, it is "never certain nor even probable that partners in a debate, even those taken as witness to a dialogue, convert themselves into partners in dialogue".
Rather, what is certain here is that we end up with more than one conversation, each structured in its own genre, with different participants, and different senses. Despite Gadamer's addiction to metalepsis, this paralogical result is not inconsistent with Gadamer's own principle that we always understand differently. In doing so, however, we do not enter into the original conversation, but create a new one for ourselves.
Do you have a body of text from Lyotard that you could link to give a better view of his thinking? Academic journals give references to his work, but I cannot find a source open to the general public.
How would you know this had happened unless you're capable of entering the original conversation to see that it's different from the one you created?
Your question is a good one.
In the Republic, Glaucon wants to get to an end and be done with the matter. Socrates turns that desire into a new problem. But it is still the old problem too.
This expression does not fit with any of the text I have read. It contradicts the argument in Philosophical Fragments. It turns the Works of Love into a cruel joke. I think you are mistaken.