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
