Power
dynamics exist in earliest societies between the ruler(s) and the
common people. Hierarchies exist in ape societies and the earliest
human societies. We saw the divide in Grossman of the officers from the
soldiers, of those who make the call and those who carry out the
orders. We have seen how in the Egyptian wisdom the earliest societies
created systems of class and ability as they gathered cultures and
technologies and developed them.
Class
is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we
know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in
America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that
OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This
was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. We
amplified our accusation of them in our media (including both news and
fiction), and muffled anything that could help their accusation of us.
The same messages go on today with Islam and China. In truth, class
and power have been a very familiar problem since we were apes. Power
and authority are a two edged sword. On the one hand, one wants leaders
and followers to organize and coordinate human society. On the other
hand, one also wants equality and sympathy which power tends to distort
and ignore.
America
is caught in this bind still today (as is all of humanity). According
to some statistics, the powerful today own more than ever before in
history, both in amount and in percentage, in spite of the equal and
opposite truth that the middle class and class mobility are also larger
today than ever before. With modernity and life saturated with devices,
humans are more enabled than ever before. This means that the common
people are more enabled than ever before AND the gap between common
people and the powerful is greater than ever before, which is
counter-intuitive. Consider that in the year 1000 in Europe, the
average nobleman owned one horse, one sword and shield, and often could
not write their own name. The gap today between rich and poor is far
greater than the gap between the toiling serf and the noble lord of the
middle ages. This is very similar to Grossman remarking that Alexander
only lost 700 soldiers in his entire quest for empire in 300 BCE, an
absurdly low body count for a modern conflict.
What is Class?
Class
is any division of people into recognizable groups. If any group is
recognizable to themselves and other groups, this is enough to claim the
group is a self-conscious social class. When talking about social
class, we often concentrate on the differences of power and ability that
people have in a society. There are two types of class status,
ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common
indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe),
family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture
(religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status
are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes
money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor,
success, celebrity).
There
is plenty of evidence that apes know the difference between a
privileged position on top and a marginalized position on the bottom.
In Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In the Flesh,
Lakoff (a Berkeley professor of ability and fame) says that the human
mind is ‘hardwired’ to think up as powerful and down and weakness. Thus
we can draw a simple chart of upper and lower class. While the
extremes have always been there, as society has developed we have
developed and complexified the arrangement. The growth of the middle
class is an age old process, but with modernity and devices the middle
classes have become quite complicated.
On
top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it
they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little
that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle
are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain
property.
The middle thus includes everyone from field workers and janitors to doctors and attorneys.
In
ancient societies, often the leaders were from privileged families that
had it made in the shade owning everything, and beneath them would be
warriors, merchants, artists, farmers and workers. What we have seen
over time through the common history of cultures is that as the devices
increased different groups gained power and could raise their status.
This leads all the way to the complex middle class of today. We saw in
ancient Egypt how the classes of scribes flourished, and specialized
classes of scribes leads us to academia today. Both Mahavira of Jainism
and the Buddha both came from the warrior 2nd caste in India between
800 and 500, which scholars have said indicates that the second class
was making power grabs from the highest priest Brahman class at this
time. Consider that artists were not rich or famous among the
population until modern art made the painter a celebrity.
The
complex of the middle class today shows us many types of people who
have condensed cultures and strategies for maintaining their position
and authority. Consider that a doctor’s opinion is worth something to
the patient or the toothpaste company advertising agent, but the doctor
has to be backed by the state. Doctors have great power, and thus the
ability to acquire greater status individually through money, ability,
fame, marrying into the right family, but the doctor who has to earn
money is still not upper class. A true upper class member does either
management or no work at all and simply owns property. A doctor who
sees patients is thus upper middle class, or professional class.
The
one to bring all of this out into public discussion was Karl Marx, who
we already heard from in objection to utilitarianism (though Marx could
be called a utilitarian himself). Marx was disillusioned by the German
failed revolutions of 1849. Moving to England, Marx saw the growing
classes of factory workers and others in harsh conditions, and began
writing books. The French Revolution had shown everyone that the
leaders can be removed (the French noble families). Marx was convinced
that just as the French had removed the noble families, there was a new
upper class that was settling into modernity that would have to be
removed. The old upper class in all societies were the noble families.
Now, just as warriors had risen up against the Brahmins in the time of
Buddha, the merchants and traders had come in modernity to raise
themselves with wealth to be equal to or even above the nobles. This
means that modernity has seen wealth rise to trump family as the biggest
class indicator. This is not to say that family or ethnicity no longer
matter (consider the Walton family who founded Wal-Mart, three of whom
are in the top 10 wealthiest individuals in the world), but now an owner
of a wealthy company is as upper class as one can get in America. This
is in part due to American culture which ditched the British nobility
system in its breaking off from the Empire.
In
America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top
1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get
that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class
(over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the
remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000).
This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times
what the lowest middle class members earn.
How
in America is such power and privilege maintained? Don’t we have a
democracy in which everyone can be heard? Didn’t we ditch the British
nobility? How is it that the rich and powerful seem to be able to do
whatever they want without much attention, but when the common people
need schools or medical coverage there is always too much resistance?
In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality,
Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in
America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to
the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the
number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line
(to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant
mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival
rates in Malaysia and India.
In the second article, Media Magic,
Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class
disappear from America. In propaganda week, we talked about the
messages that the Soviets and US sent back and forth. In American
media, not only are black people as tokens doing just great (often as
cops and soldiers), but no one is starving or living in their car with
their family, picket fenced houses have plenty to eat and a large
shopping budget, and class difference rarely makes a difference. In the
80s there were many evil rich guy villains, but the fantastic plot
always thwarts the evil guy with too much money and a moustache (great
example is Goonies,
where the families were going to loose their houses to a golf course
run by evil rich father and son, up to the father’s final line ‘No one
will ever loose their house again!’ while throwing pirate treasure up
into the air).
Poverty
is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in
500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set
the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a
sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print.
Visually, they are never given a face with photographs or clips (a
particularly important factor – tell people to go look up the whistle
tips clip, compare the tipsters to the middle class white woman
complaining ‘I have to get up for work’). Whenever the poor are
covered, it is ALWAYS from a middle class white perspective, never from
the perspective of the poor. This is lined up next to Democrats
unabashedly supporting the middle class but never the poor with words
and programs. Obama as other Democrats support “middle class families”,
and no one mentions needed programs to help the impoverished get out of
poverty. They have to speak as if there IS no poverty, that America’s
way of life does not have harmful and increasing side effects.
It
is estimated that 2/3rds of the Senate is composed of millionaires.
This is quite disproportionate to the population. The media never
point this out or indicate it is a problem.
Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies
Walter
Karp (1934-1989) was a writer and journalist largely for Harper’s
magazine. His favorite subjects are the crooked nature of America
getting into wars, which he argues are power grabs for the upper class,
and the shallow and deceptive two party system of American politics, the
subject of Indispensable Enemies, which he argued is a device to keep power in the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the common people.
Some great Karp quotes:
“The left and right wings of the party establishment- two claws of an ancient bird of prey.”
“The
public school system…a 12 year sentence of mind control…destroying the
exerxise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek
subservience to authority.”
“The
most esteemed journalists are the most servile. For it is by making
themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’
sources.”
And, my favorite: America has one party with two wings.
(Note similarity to spectrum within one communist party system, left and right leaning)
In
Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics
there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s
group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for
itself. Karp gives as example country and city folk (farms vs. roads
and schools), where both seem to stop the other from getting what they
want but neither can get what they want. Karp will spend much of the
book examining the two party system in this light.
Karp
argues that we are being given the run-around. We are being told that
this is the unfortunate bi-product of living in a diverse land of
freedom, but the powerful get what they want and the powerless are being
told that they get nothing because they and the other groups of
powerless are free and opposed to each other. We live in the most
powerful nation thus far in history, but we can’t get anything done for
the common people and are told this is BECAUSE of the common people and
how free they are to oppose one another in their opinions. Karp says:
this does nothing to explain how the things that get done do get done,
and how they do benefit particular (and powerful) interests.
Karp
argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win
elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two
parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has
risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we
see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down
the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in
American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting
popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they
ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that
Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking
about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same.
Karp
argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to
maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the
thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center
is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a
district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward
real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and
get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will
kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the
next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the
50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have
one party, with two wings, not two parties at all.
Remember
that Karp started writing as a college student during the Vietnam War.
He saw how the Democrats weakly criticized the way the war was run but
helped kill the peace movement by “keeping the war out of politics”.
This is what we have seen since Karp’s death in the middle east
conflicts. We can say in light of the Corporation that both parties
also keep corporations and their ability to pay both sides to play ‘out
of politics’.
In
addition, both parties collude to keep third parties out. If either
gets significantly over 60% of the vote, one party could break into two.
It serves the simple interests of both to keep just about 50%. That
way, both can bank half the population without fear of a third party
taking part, and the two can drive the people against each other with
empty ideology and there is no competition either for the liberal or
conservative establishment such that they would have to do something.
In
political science classes, you can learn that most Americans do not
vote because they do not believe that they can get anything done. Karp
is arguing that the parties are in fact trying for this, to involve one
with a polarized party such that one votes merely for right or left and
nothing else concrete. You also learn that most powerful corporations
and figures straddle both sides of American politics, contributing to
both Democrat and Republican campaigns. This is the way that the device
works. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the
interests of American power (which is held in particular American
hands). The common people are set against each other and told that
because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done.
The
parties are not in fact trying to please the public at all, but merely
polarize liberals against conservatives while getting next to nothing
done any direction for the common people. The parties want your
allegiance but no enthusiasm or interest. The decisions that are real,
that affect power dynamics and class relations, are to be made by the
powerful and not put into the awareness of the people at large. This is
how the powerful maintain their ability and the common people are kept
from doing anything meaningful or lasting. For example, if a war is on
the table, all of congress votes for it and then the Democrats start
hemming and hawing to the public about how this war could be better
managed. What Karp describes of the Vietnam war, we see again post
September 11th. Obama shifts the war back to Afghanistan, yet does not
say the war should never have happened. BUT: conservatives can’t lobby
congress to get complete freedom for gun ownership for the common
people.
Karp
argues that the real issues that deal with power in America are never
put on the ballot. Consider gun ownership and gay marriage. These two
issues will likely be kicked back and forth between liberals and
conservatives without much concession. No matter which way either goes,
opposite pressure can be mounted easily, and the upper class is not
affected in the slightest. However, whether medical coverage should be
free rather than owned by powerful people is an issue that changes class
relations, and thus it is not a decision that should be given to the
common people. It is clear that both liberals and conservatives would
vote for free medical coverage even with conservative spin against
government spending. Karp argues this is the reason you do not see
anything like this on the ballot. In other words, it is all a game of
good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margarine.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Introduction to Philosophy: Shopenhauer & Nietzsche
GERMAN PESSIMISM (aka ‘Happy Times’)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany and German thought had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in ancient Egypt, Greece and China, human thought often flourishes in periods of tragedy and war as people are forced to turn critically to old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions about what works and does not for the individual and the community. In the late 1700s, the American and French revolutions, along with developments in England, had brought new rights to common people. When the German people rose up to fight for rights similar to their neighbors, several German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movement. Germany was at this time a loose confederacy of regional principalities, ruled locally. Hegel’s student Marx, German though writing much of his work in England, was writing for this discouraged audience, arguing that the people would rise up and overcome oppression.
Recall that Descartes, Kant and other rationalists argued that the world (Descartes) and/or the mind (Kant) worked like a clock that provides us with mathematical and deductive certainties. When the political tide turned against the German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the American and French revolutions, the people began to wonder: Is the world, society or mind run by reason? This created a tide of pessimistic popular and intellectual culture. Remember that Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) in the Republic argued that the world is true and created by ideal forms that can be known by the just and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice was merely the will of the stronger who could impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought likewise turned from the reason of Kant towards the will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the world. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true. Life, at its best, is romantic and dramatic, not rational or mathematical.
German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement we will study soon) and post-WWII through the Vietnam War for America (producing the counter-culture of first the beatniks and then hippies, particularly thriving in the Bay Area). Nietzsche has been celebrated by counter-cultural thinkers and artists as a pessimist who trashed his own country, culture and people as prideful and ignorant sheep who would rather seek pride in being a member of a group than be excellent as individuals.
SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860)
Arthur Schopenhauer, who looks something like a cross between a cranky grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of Kant, unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued against him frequently. Kant and Schopenhauer were both great influences on Wittgenstein, who we will study next. Remember that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can have about it are assumptions, but the mind works mathematically and so we can know the categories of the mind with deductive certainty. Schopenhauer, more pessimistic than Kant, saw the gulf and gap between the world and our ideas as a stormy abyss that forever frustrates our idealizations. He agreed with Kant that the mind works categorically and mathematically, but the gap between our conceptions and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned Schopenhauer from Rationalism and mathematical science to Buddhism and ecstatic art.
Remember that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the ‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason through dialectic. Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that reason could not overcome the gap. In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both taught at the University of Berlin as philosophical rivals. As Hegel became increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy, but when this backfired and more students attended Hegel’s lectures Schopenhauer resigned in disgust. Schopenhauer openly called Hegel a charlatan who tricks people into believing reason completely fleshes the world out, and wrote that when he read Hegel’s central Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind he felt as if he were in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the most sublime philosophy of world history, and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my death”. Schopenhauer saw parallels between the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha and his own philosophy of existence as will and suffering. He wrote that, if his own philosophy is correct, it is expected that it agrees with the most popular system of thought in human history. He received instruction in meditation, though it is unknown whether he practiced with any regularity. Like much of Indian thought and Hume, who himself may very well have been influenced by Indian sources, Schopenhauer argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the fundamental essence of all things.
Schopenhauer’s great work is The World as Will and Representation. The mind represents and idealizes the world, which is essentially will. All things, including the self and conceptions, are manifestations of will. Recall that Buddha taught that existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire and attachment. For Schopenhauer, the world is full of perpetual striving for ideals that never come to perfection. The classic metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship build of ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires. One must recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold one’s course in spite of the endless hardship. Developing sea legs and a tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.
There is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self. Through art, which can include philosophy, we can temporarily escape ourselves and our desires through ecstasy and identification with others and the whole. Nietzsche similarly argued that creativity was the highest form of life, but he argued that it was not the loss of self and escape from will but rather the highest activity of the individual, expressing power and accomplishment. For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an individual but identification with the world beyond representation, feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.
Schopenhauer considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no particular things or ideas. In this way it is similar to American Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are quite similar to Darwin. Like Jains, but unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar manifestations of will, striving and suffering. In one passage near the end of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea-lions and the way that they form a circle around their young. Whenever a pup tries to escape the circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach it to stay where it is safe. Clearly he is drawing a comparison between the way sea-lions and humans learn through suffering and overcoming of will in themselves and others. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who saw civilization and human behaviors as repression of desire and will, as the super-ego putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were critical of philosophy for avoiding subjects such as sex, laughter and friendship because this raw material of life, the most vibrant forms of will, defies most powerfully conceptualization and categorization.
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
Nietzsche is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. Descartes is also called the first modern thinker, but truthfully he was the first modern European thinker, and Europe is being identified with modernity. Nietzsche is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt. He argued, like Descartes, that everything must be questioned, but unlike Descartes he argued against the certainty of religion, science and politics. For Nietzsche, truth is an individual quest that should not be put in servitude to an institution. Because human beings are easily made into sheep, the excellent must strive to overcome both themselves and institutions to bring greater truth to the world and greater meaning to their own lives.
Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers, five generations deep (following his great-great-great-grandfather, thrice times great like Hermes Trismegistus, the author of the Hermetic Corpus of Neo-Platonism). Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, suffering both physically and mentally. Nietzsche as a boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher, and older brother died in spite of being Christian. Though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian, like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy (after a brief period of turning to mathematics). It seems that many great philosophers of Europe begin by studying religion or science (particularly mathematics) and then turning to philosophy to seek the rules of the rules, the deeper understanding of human understandings.
Nietzsche versus Morality
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity and systems of thought critically and see that following the rules (the rationalist morality of Kant) or ‘the greater common good’ (the utilitarian morality of Mill) is for sheep and not for the genuine individual. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality and individuality is the beautiful mountain range for each individual to climb and conquer.
Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality that limits the individual, and he called Christianity, scientific ‘objectivity’, German nationalism and German racism (very much centered in anti-semitism) out on this vocally. These are all the systems that Germans of his day identified with. Nietzsche was possibly the first to openly call all the group identities and institutions of his day foolish. He is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider that in one place he wrote, “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals, a growing subject of his day that reached its peak in the Nazi regime, but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.
Nietzsche argued that in any system, the revered leaders always have the strength and individuality to criticize the system. Unfortunately, then the individual’s thought becomes canon and dogma, and the process repeats as Hegel recognized in each stage of history. Nietzsche praised Jesus as an individual who criticized the religious and political system of his day, standing up to the Pharisees and the Romans, but Nietzsche bashes Paul and Christianity for systematizing Jesus’ thought and actions, making them constraints on the individual. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche calls Paul the penultimate priest, the individual who takes their own inability and imposes it on others.
It is often noted that Nietzsche was a critic of religion and Christianity. In two places, he famously says that God is dead, and you and I have killed him. This is not, however, confined to religion. By the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche was equally critical of any authority, of any singular interpretation of truth, whether in the name of religion, science, philosophy, race or politics (the first four often serving the last). One of the fundamental thoughts of Nietzsche is that truth is always individual interpretation, and that all philosophy and thought are a self-confession of their author. To accept any human truth passively, whether religious, scientific, academic, or political, is to compromise one’s individuality, one’s ability to create greater meaning and truth.
Like Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker Nietzsche loved most, the world is unknown beyond any human attempt to understand it by experts, making us little more than apes (a metaphor used by both Heraclitus and Nietzsche). The great individuals, those who form the systems themselves, are those who both support and oppose the system to create something new. Consider that if you believe Newton and his ‘laws’ are entirely correct and certain fact, you would not be Einstein and invent the Theory of Relativity. In one passage I take dear to heart, Nietzsche warns us: If you thought religion created problems and mislead people by offering them an identity that embraces some while rejecting others, wait until you see how this can be done in the name of science and the modern nation-state.
It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis, thanks to the efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, to support their ideas of the rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again, and he attacked both nationalism and racism as poisons that intoxicate the weak-minded. Nietzsche does speak of the superman, the ‘ubermensch’, much as the Nazis called themselves the supermen and other races the inferior, the under-men or sub-human (‘untermensch’). When Nietzsche uses the term ‘ubermensch’, he means the one who overcomes both themselves and their own culture, not those who embrace group identity to give meaning to their lives. Nietzsche’s superior person is the visionary thinker or artist, not a nation or race. Nietzsche called himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’, and moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to walk alone in the mountains.
Nietzsche versus Nihilism
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Indeed, he predicted excellent individual thinkers (such as Bataille, Foucault, Derrida) as well as corrupters (such as the Nazis) following in his wake. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could escape individuality and will. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, though this is just what his critics, religious and not, have often called him.
Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Non-Being. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also avoids believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of nihilism, the nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He fears a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there. Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create. As the Nietzschean founder of the Dada art movement Tristan Tzara wrote, “One must have the courage to be both for and against thought”.
Nietzsche versus Women
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings, a particularly interesting example of his philosophical method, is his sudden and unexpected turn in his book Human All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to saying, “Here are some of my truths”, and without warning begin trashing women, including the famous line, “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. Why is Nietzsche suddenly misogynistic? He has told us that philosophy is a self-confession of the author, and that truth is always open to interpretation. Nietzsche is putting on a self-conscious philosophical performance, inspiring to many including Bataille and Derrida. Nietzsche here is showing us both sides of himself at once, both his hatred of women and his understanding that this is merely his own twisted perspective. Unlike other philosophers, who write what they hope can be consistent and clear truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological, contradictory and complex, and that beauty and achievement come from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the ancient Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said in Nietzsche’s time and still is today. He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Apollo was the ancient Greek god of knowledge, and Dionysus was the god of ecstasy, intoxication and transformation. Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape restraint, to categorically understand and transcend categorical understanding, engaging in both science and art. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of understanding versus reason and culture versus counter-culture we studied last time. However, unlike Hegel and following Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the opposite of understanding not as reason but will, not as mathematical science but as creative expression. This became influential on the philosopher Bataille, who argued that systems of meaning, knowledge and economics are not simply systems of containing and maintaining things but also of release and excess.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
In this book, Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond categorical understandings of good and evil and of true and false to show the complexity of human meaning and life. He starts this work asking: Why do we want simple truth or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely started, but it has been assumed that something in us wants absolute truth and can acquire it. Nietzsche says that asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk. If we question our ability to gain truth, it becomes possible that we will lose all hope for truth and turn to nihilism, which Nietzsche argues later is equally as dangerous to human creativity and the process of life as the belief in objectivity. Typically, thinkers have assumed that there must be absolute pure truth apart from or hidden within the messy world and various human opinions. He writes:
“This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which gives away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this ‘faith’ that they trouble themselves about ‘knowledge’, about something that is finally baptized solemnly as ‘the truth’. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary...For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things, maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!”
(BGE 2)
Note the ‘frog perspectives’ in their nooks, used by painters, is possibly from the Daoist Zhuangzi. Later, Nietzsche uses the term ‘well-frogs’ similarly. European painting was influenced in the Renaissance and later Enlightenment by Chinese landscape paintings.
“After having looked long enough between the philosopher’s lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking...most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts. Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life, for example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than ‘truth’... (BGE 3)
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment...The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating, and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments apriori) are the most indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” (BGE 4)
Notice Nietzsche calling Kant out on apriori truth as a fiction, as well as the title of the work stated here.
“What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are, how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray, in short, their childishness and childlikeness, but that they are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish, and talk of ‘inspiration’), while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’, most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract, that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’, and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself. The equally stiff and decorous tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce, this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and finds it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists...” (BGE 5)
Notice Nietzsche calling the dialectic of Kant and Hegel, the two big names in German thought in Nietzsche’s time, a sham that parades itself as pure cold truth. Nietzsche argues that truth is seduction, we believe what we want to believe and project it through abstraction into the places we can not see or are afraid to look. Baudrillard, another French Nietzschean philosopher, took ‘Truth is Seduction’ as the starting point of his philosophy, wandering in Vegas and marvelling at the seduction of consumerism and the spectacles we can create through technology.
“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir... Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time, and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.” (BGE 6)
“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” (BGE 14)
“There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’, for example, ‘I think’, or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’, as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself’, without falsification on the part of either the subject or the object...I shall repeat a hundred times, we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!” (BGE 16)
“With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. IT thinks...The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.” (BGE 17)
“O holy simplicity! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance...and only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement! Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation...here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitable constructed and suitable falsified world, at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life.” (BGE 24)
“Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom, of suffering ‘for truth’s sake’, even of defending yourselves...as though ‘the truth’ were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!” (BGE 25)
“In all seriousness, the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers...A philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’, as the being who has so far always been fooled best on earth. He has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion...Why couldn’t the world that concerns us, be a fiction? And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’, couldn’t one answer simply: Why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction too?...Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)
“One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous.” (BGE 41)
“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” (BGE 76)
“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” (BGE 78)
“A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” (BGE 94)
“A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them.” (BGE 126)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.
Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but in this scene the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same. Some of the most quoted lines of the text come from this scene, as Zarathustra addresses the crowd.
“I teach you the superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? All beings have so far created something beyond themselves, and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame, and just the same shall man be to the superman. You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape that any of the apes. Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom...Truly, man is a polluted stream. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” (TSZ 3)
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss, a dangerous crossing...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” (TSZ 4)
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany and German thought had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in ancient Egypt, Greece and China, human thought often flourishes in periods of tragedy and war as people are forced to turn critically to old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions about what works and does not for the individual and the community. In the late 1700s, the American and French revolutions, along with developments in England, had brought new rights to common people. When the German people rose up to fight for rights similar to their neighbors, several German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movement. Germany was at this time a loose confederacy of regional principalities, ruled locally. Hegel’s student Marx, German though writing much of his work in England, was writing for this discouraged audience, arguing that the people would rise up and overcome oppression.
Recall that Descartes, Kant and other rationalists argued that the world (Descartes) and/or the mind (Kant) worked like a clock that provides us with mathematical and deductive certainties. When the political tide turned against the German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the American and French revolutions, the people began to wonder: Is the world, society or mind run by reason? This created a tide of pessimistic popular and intellectual culture. Remember that Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) in the Republic argued that the world is true and created by ideal forms that can be known by the just and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice was merely the will of the stronger who could impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought likewise turned from the reason of Kant towards the will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the world. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true. Life, at its best, is romantic and dramatic, not rational or mathematical.
German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement we will study soon) and post-WWII through the Vietnam War for America (producing the counter-culture of first the beatniks and then hippies, particularly thriving in the Bay Area). Nietzsche has been celebrated by counter-cultural thinkers and artists as a pessimist who trashed his own country, culture and people as prideful and ignorant sheep who would rather seek pride in being a member of a group than be excellent as individuals.
SCHOPENHAUER (1788 - 1860)
Arthur Schopenhauer, who looks something like a cross between a cranky grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of Kant, unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued against him frequently. Kant and Schopenhauer were both great influences on Wittgenstein, who we will study next. Remember that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can have about it are assumptions, but the mind works mathematically and so we can know the categories of the mind with deductive certainty. Schopenhauer, more pessimistic than Kant, saw the gulf and gap between the world and our ideas as a stormy abyss that forever frustrates our idealizations. He agreed with Kant that the mind works categorically and mathematically, but the gap between our conceptions and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned Schopenhauer from Rationalism and mathematical science to Buddhism and ecstatic art.
Remember that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the ‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason through dialectic. Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that reason could not overcome the gap. In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both taught at the University of Berlin as philosophical rivals. As Hegel became increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy, but when this backfired and more students attended Hegel’s lectures Schopenhauer resigned in disgust. Schopenhauer openly called Hegel a charlatan who tricks people into believing reason completely fleshes the world out, and wrote that when he read Hegel’s central Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind he felt as if he were in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought, specifically the Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the most sublime philosophy of world history, and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and will be the consolation of my death”. Schopenhauer saw parallels between the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha and his own philosophy of existence as will and suffering. He wrote that, if his own philosophy is correct, it is expected that it agrees with the most popular system of thought in human history. He received instruction in meditation, though it is unknown whether he practiced with any regularity. Like much of Indian thought and Hume, who himself may very well have been influenced by Indian sources, Schopenhauer argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the fundamental essence of all things.
Schopenhauer’s great work is The World as Will and Representation. The mind represents and idealizes the world, which is essentially will. All things, including the self and conceptions, are manifestations of will. Recall that Buddha taught that existence is suffering and the cause of suffering is desire and attachment. For Schopenhauer, the world is full of perpetual striving for ideals that never come to perfection. The classic metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship build of ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires. One must recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold one’s course in spite of the endless hardship. Developing sea legs and a tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.
There is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self. Through art, which can include philosophy, we can temporarily escape ourselves and our desires through ecstasy and identification with others and the whole. Nietzsche similarly argued that creativity was the highest form of life, but he argued that it was not the loss of self and escape from will but rather the highest activity of the individual, expressing power and accomplishment. For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an individual but identification with the world beyond representation, feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.
Schopenhauer considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no particular things or ideas. In this way it is similar to American Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are quite similar to Darwin. Like Jains, but unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar manifestations of will, striving and suffering. In one passage near the end of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea-lions and the way that they form a circle around their young. Whenever a pup tries to escape the circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach it to stay where it is safe. Clearly he is drawing a comparison between the way sea-lions and humans learn through suffering and overcoming of will in themselves and others. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who saw civilization and human behaviors as repression of desire and will, as the super-ego putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were critical of philosophy for avoiding subjects such as sex, laughter and friendship because this raw material of life, the most vibrant forms of will, defies most powerfully conceptualization and categorization.
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
Nietzsche is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. Descartes is also called the first modern thinker, but truthfully he was the first modern European thinker, and Europe is being identified with modernity. Nietzsche is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt. He argued, like Descartes, that everything must be questioned, but unlike Descartes he argued against the certainty of religion, science and politics. For Nietzsche, truth is an individual quest that should not be put in servitude to an institution. Because human beings are easily made into sheep, the excellent must strive to overcome both themselves and institutions to bring greater truth to the world and greater meaning to their own lives.
Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers, five generations deep (following his great-great-great-grandfather, thrice times great like Hermes Trismegistus, the author of the Hermetic Corpus of Neo-Platonism). Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, suffering both physically and mentally. Nietzsche as a boy wondered why both his father, a passionate preacher, and older brother died in spite of being Christian. Though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian, like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy (after a brief period of turning to mathematics). It seems that many great philosophers of Europe begin by studying religion or science (particularly mathematics) and then turning to philosophy to seek the rules of the rules, the deeper understanding of human understandings.
Nietzsche versus Morality
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity and systems of thought critically and see that following the rules (the rationalist morality of Kant) or ‘the greater common good’ (the utilitarian morality of Mill) is for sheep and not for the genuine individual. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality and individuality is the beautiful mountain range for each individual to climb and conquer.
Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality that limits the individual, and he called Christianity, scientific ‘objectivity’, German nationalism and German racism (very much centered in anti-semitism) out on this vocally. These are all the systems that Germans of his day identified with. Nietzsche was possibly the first to openly call all the group identities and institutions of his day foolish. He is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider that in one place he wrote, “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals, a growing subject of his day that reached its peak in the Nazi regime, but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.
Nietzsche argued that in any system, the revered leaders always have the strength and individuality to criticize the system. Unfortunately, then the individual’s thought becomes canon and dogma, and the process repeats as Hegel recognized in each stage of history. Nietzsche praised Jesus as an individual who criticized the religious and political system of his day, standing up to the Pharisees and the Romans, but Nietzsche bashes Paul and Christianity for systematizing Jesus’ thought and actions, making them constraints on the individual. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche calls Paul the penultimate priest, the individual who takes their own inability and imposes it on others.
It is often noted that Nietzsche was a critic of religion and Christianity. In two places, he famously says that God is dead, and you and I have killed him. This is not, however, confined to religion. By the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche was equally critical of any authority, of any singular interpretation of truth, whether in the name of religion, science, philosophy, race or politics (the first four often serving the last). One of the fundamental thoughts of Nietzsche is that truth is always individual interpretation, and that all philosophy and thought are a self-confession of their author. To accept any human truth passively, whether religious, scientific, academic, or political, is to compromise one’s individuality, one’s ability to create greater meaning and truth.
Like Heraclitus, the ancient Greek thinker Nietzsche loved most, the world is unknown beyond any human attempt to understand it by experts, making us little more than apes (a metaphor used by both Heraclitus and Nietzsche). The great individuals, those who form the systems themselves, are those who both support and oppose the system to create something new. Consider that if you believe Newton and his ‘laws’ are entirely correct and certain fact, you would not be Einstein and invent the Theory of Relativity. In one passage I take dear to heart, Nietzsche warns us: If you thought religion created problems and mislead people by offering them an identity that embraces some while rejecting others, wait until you see how this can be done in the name of science and the modern nation-state.
It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis, thanks to the efforts of Nietzsche’s sister, to support their ideas of the rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again, and he attacked both nationalism and racism as poisons that intoxicate the weak-minded. Nietzsche does speak of the superman, the ‘ubermensch’, much as the Nazis called themselves the supermen and other races the inferior, the under-men or sub-human (‘untermensch’). When Nietzsche uses the term ‘ubermensch’, he means the one who overcomes both themselves and their own culture, not those who embrace group identity to give meaning to their lives. Nietzsche’s superior person is the visionary thinker or artist, not a nation or race. Nietzsche called himself an ‘anti-anti-semite’, and moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to walk alone in the mountains.
Nietzsche versus Nihilism
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Indeed, he predicted excellent individual thinkers (such as Bataille, Foucault, Derrida) as well as corrupters (such as the Nazis) following in his wake. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could escape individuality and will. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, though this is just what his critics, religious and not, have often called him.
Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Non-Being. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also avoids believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of nihilism, the nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He fears a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there. Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create. As the Nietzschean founder of the Dada art movement Tristan Tzara wrote, “One must have the courage to be both for and against thought”.
Nietzsche versus Women
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings, a particularly interesting example of his philosophical method, is his sudden and unexpected turn in his book Human All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to saying, “Here are some of my truths”, and without warning begin trashing women, including the famous line, “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. Why is Nietzsche suddenly misogynistic? He has told us that philosophy is a self-confession of the author, and that truth is always open to interpretation. Nietzsche is putting on a self-conscious philosophical performance, inspiring to many including Bataille and Derrida. Nietzsche here is showing us both sides of himself at once, both his hatred of women and his understanding that this is merely his own twisted perspective. Unlike other philosophers, who write what they hope can be consistent and clear truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological, contradictory and complex, and that beauty and achievement come from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the ancient Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said in Nietzsche’s time and still is today. He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Apollo was the ancient Greek god of knowledge, and Dionysus was the god of ecstasy, intoxication and transformation. Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape restraint, to categorically understand and transcend categorical understanding, engaging in both science and art. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of understanding versus reason and culture versus counter-culture we studied last time. However, unlike Hegel and following Schopenhauer’s criticism of Hegel, Nietzsche identifies the opposite of understanding not as reason but will, not as mathematical science but as creative expression. This became influential on the philosopher Bataille, who argued that systems of meaning, knowledge and economics are not simply systems of containing and maintaining things but also of release and excess.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
In this book, Nietzsche attempts to push thought beyond categorical understandings of good and evil and of true and false to show the complexity of human meaning and life. He starts this work asking: Why do we want simple truth or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely started, but it has been assumed that something in us wants absolute truth and can acquire it. Nietzsche says that asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk. If we question our ability to gain truth, it becomes possible that we will lose all hope for truth and turn to nihilism, which Nietzsche argues later is equally as dangerous to human creativity and the process of life as the belief in objectivity. Typically, thinkers have assumed that there must be absolute pure truth apart from or hidden within the messy world and various human opinions. He writes:
“This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which gives away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this ‘faith’ that they trouble themselves about ‘knowledge’, about something that is finally baptized solemnly as ‘the truth’. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary...For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things, maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe!”
(BGE 2)
Note the ‘frog perspectives’ in their nooks, used by painters, is possibly from the Daoist Zhuangzi. Later, Nietzsche uses the term ‘well-frogs’ similarly. European painting was influenced in the Renaissance and later Enlightenment by Chinese landscape paintings.
“After having looked long enough between the philosopher’s lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking...most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts. Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life, for example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth less than ‘truth’... (BGE 3)
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment...The question is to what extent is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating, and we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments apriori) are the most indispensable for us, that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way, and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.” (BGE 4)
Notice Nietzsche calling Kant out on apriori truth as a fiction, as well as the title of the work stated here.
“What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are, how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray, in short, their childishness and childlikeness, but that they are not honest enough in their work, although they all make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish, and talk of ‘inspiration’), while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of ‘inspiration’, most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract, that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’, and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself. The equally stiff and decorous tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ really lead astray and seduce, this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and finds it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists...” (BGE 5)
Notice Nietzsche calling the dialectic of Kant and Hegel, the two big names in German thought in Nietzsche’s time, a sham that parades itself as pure cold truth. Nietzsche argues that truth is seduction, we believe what we want to believe and project it through abstraction into the places we can not see or are afraid to look. Baudrillard, another French Nietzschean philosopher, took ‘Truth is Seduction’ as the starting point of his philosophy, wandering in Vegas and marvelling at the seduction of consumerism and the spectacles we can create through technology.
“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir... Accordingly, I do not believe that a ‘drive to knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see what extent they may have been at play just here as inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time, and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives.” (BGE 6)
“It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” (BGE 14)
“There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’, for example, ‘I think’, or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’, as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself’, without falsification on the part of either the subject or the object...I shall repeat a hundred times, we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!” (BGE 16)
“With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede: namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. IT thinks...The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions, that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.” (BGE 17)
“O holy simplicity! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance...and only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue, not as its opposite, but as its refinement! Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation...here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitable constructed and suitable falsified world, at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life.” (BGE 24)
“Take care, philosophers and friends, of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom, of suffering ‘for truth’s sake’, even of defending yourselves...as though ‘the truth’ were such an innocuous and incompetent creature as to require protectors!” (BGE 25)
“In all seriousness, the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers...A philosopher has nothing less than a right to ‘bad character’, as the being who has so far always been fooled best on earth. He has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion...Why couldn’t the world that concerns us, be a fiction? And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’, couldn’t one answer simply: Why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction too?...Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)
“One should not dodge one’s tests, though they may be the most dangerous.” (BGE 41)
“Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.” (BGE 76)
“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” (BGE 78)
“A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.” (BGE 94)
“A people is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. Yes, and then to get around them.” (BGE 126)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.
Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but in this scene the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same. Some of the most quoted lines of the text come from this scene, as Zarathustra addresses the crowd.
“I teach you the superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? All beings have so far created something beyond themselves, and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame, and just the same shall man be to the superman. You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even yet man is more of an ape that any of the apes. Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom...Truly, man is a polluted stream. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” (TSZ 3)
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman, a rope over an abyss, a dangerous crossing...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” (TSZ 4)
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Intro Philosophy: Third Response Paper
For
the third paper, you should discuss in at least three typed
double-spaced pages whether there are absolute certainties (the position
of Descartes) or if all truth is assumption (the position of Hume). A
good example is 2 + 3 = 5, about which Descartes says we could not
possibly be deceived. Do we know this truth by deduction to be
absolutely certain, or do we assume this by induction to be decently
useful?
Social & Political Philosophy: Anarchism
We
have been studying political philosophies that support or advance
toward bottom-up democracy through top-down structures of authority.
Anarchism also aims at bottom-up democracy, but more radically does not
propose any top-down authority for support. Just as Thoreau wrote in
Civil Disobedience, “That government is best which governs the least”,
Anarchists believe in getting rid of government as much as possible.
This may or may not leave room for a diminished government that leans
towards capitalism or socialism, but it is at odds with communism
imposing a dictatorship even though it also ultimately aims at direct
governance by the people. Hard capitalism could be similar if not
identical to anarchism (remember that communists consider capitalism to
be anarchism already but anarchism for the wealthy rather than for the
common people), however capitalism traditionally relies on the state for
money and military support. Socialism is not compatible with complete
anarchism because it presupposes a state structure, but a more
libertarian socialism would aim at anarchism as much as it is possible
and feasible, just like communism.
How
feasible is anarchy? Some say it is impossible. Others say it is
entirely possible and we can figure it out and live it now. Others say
we cannot figure it out, but we should dream the impossible and strive
to achieve what may only be a dream for now. To many anarchism is no
different than Hobbes’ state of nature: nasty, brutish and short-lived.
Without government, the police and military for example, how would the
powerless and marginalized be defended from the powerful and dominant?
Anarchists would side with Saint-Simon, the socialist, and argue that
technology and culture have advanced to a point where power can be held
by the people without the necessary abuses of the state. Government and
structures of power, they would argue, are already inherently abusive,
and anarchism would be less abusive than the current structures of
power. For instance, while the powerful could still hire private armies
to do what they want without fear of the state police, international
wars would become virtually impossible.
One
can find the idea that power is inherently abusive in ancient Chinese
and Greek thought (Daoism and Stoicism specifically), in the thought of
Rousseau and Thoreau, as well as libertarianism of 1800s France and
America today. The term ‘anarchism’ was used as a negative term by the
Royalists against the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War
(involving Hobbes and Locke). During the French Revolution,
progressives who began opposing the dictatorship of Robespierre began
using the term in a positive way. This prefigured the split between
communists and anarchists. The question is, is centralized authority
more or less abusive than decentralized authority? All the political
philosophies theoretically aim at decentralized authority, but none
trusts decentralized authority like anarchism. One could equally say
that none trusts dictatorship like communism that we have studied so
far, but fascism (which we study next week) believes in dictatorship
like communism but does not believe in evolving toward direct democracy.
Proudhon
The
first to call himself an anarchist by name was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809 – 1865). He is best known for the quote, “Property is theft”,
from his work, “What is Property?”. He is also quoted famously for
saying, “Anarchy is order”, the possible origin of the A surrounded by
an O which is the symbol of anarchism. Marx and Proudhon were friends
for awhile in Paris before splitting over differences. Proudhon argued
for a collectivism of co-ops and communes without the need for a
centralized state. Unlike Marx and communism, Proudhon did not believe
in the nationalization of property under state ownership. Through free
association, individuals labor in collectives and reap the fruit of
their efforts without individual or collective ownership of the kind
Locke felt the state must protect. Rather than property, Proudhon
argued for possession through mutual and voluntary use.
While
communists such as Marx argued that dictatorship was necessary to
transform society, Proudhon and his followers recalled the French
Revolution and argued that this would be a step backwards that would
take power from the people rather than giving power to the people.
Proudhon repeatedly spoke of “the people”, and regarded all government
as tyranny. This goes beyond Rousseau, who believes in central
government that has the support of the general will. Proudhon argued
that property was the cause of all wars, including religious wars and
the French Revolution, and so if possession through use made property
rights unnecessary war would become a thing of the past. Towards the
end of his life, Proudhon began to compromise with the idea of a balance
of central authority as a socialist, but retained his belief that
mutualism was superior and more trustworthy than authority.
Bakunin
Socialists
in Europe became polarized at this time between the communists who
followed Marx and the Anarchists who followed Proudhon and the Russian
Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876). A Hegelian like Marx, Bakunin had met
both Marx and Proudhon in Paris and translated Hegel and the Communist
Manifesto of Marx and Engels into Russian. Like Lenin and Trotsky,
Bakunin was exiled from Russia for his criticism of the tyrannical power
of the Tsar. Unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky however, Bakunin
had come to distrust authority even under the guise of socialism and
communism. At meetings of the First International socialist congress,
Marx argued that they should participate in European national elections
while Bakunin argued that they should abstain from voting and complying
with state held power. Bakunin argued for rising up against the state
in acts of open rebellion, what he called “the propaganda of the deed”
(actions speak louder than words). Later anarchists would use this
phrase to describe bombings and assassinations against those they
believe oppress the common people. The Marxists, who dominated the
congress, expelled Bakunin and his followers. Bakunin continued to
argue that no one should be given political power, not even the workers,
as this power would come to exploit the workers themselves. All
dictatorship is self-perpetuating, and a communist dictatorship would
merely claim to be the voice of the people. Marcuse and Chomsky have
both been influenced by Bakunin in their criticism of communist
dictatorship.
The Spanish Civil War
During
the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), the fascist general Francisco
Franco fought for control of a divided Spain with the support of the
fascist governments of Italy and Germany and American corporations such
as General Motors, Ford and Texaco. Those on the left, the communists,
socialists and anarchists, saw the war as a struggle for freedom, while
those on the right saw the war as a struggle for Christian civilization.
On the left were peasants, workers and intellectuals. On the right
were the clergy, the military, land owners and business interests.
Anarchism had gained more influence in Spain than elsewhere in Europe,
and for a brief time, especially in Andalusia and Catalonia, land and
industries were collectivized and run as mutualist co-ops.
Unfortunately, this success frightened the communists as well as the
fascists, and infighting between communists and anarchists weakened the
left side of the war. With the victory of Franco in 1939, these
communities were crushed and thousands of anarchists and communists
shot. I personally saw walls in Barcelona that were riddled with
pockmarks from this period. This is known as a brief period where
anarchism did flourish and work as a political form, but because it was
so brief and crushed by fascism its feasibility remains controversial.
Would it have survived and flourished had Franco and the powers that
backed him not been victorious, or would it have been swallowed up by
communism or another form of power?
Squatter’s Rights
One
concept of anarchism that still has a following today is squatter’s
rights. Do the poor have the right to seize unused property such as
houses and factories and use them as they see fit, gaining possession of
these lands and facilities through use? Capitalism and communism would
say no, because property is the right of the individual or the state,
not to be seized voluntarily. Anarchists argue that people should take
possession of buildings that are not used and put them to good use for
the good of any who wish to contribute to the effort. There are
countless squatter’s communities around the world, especially in
impoverished areas (consider homeless camps visible underneath freeway
overpasses here in the East Bay). In Detroit there have been activists
for decades who help poor families break into unused homes and repair
them so that they can be used, resulting in continuous struggles with
local police. Some of these activists even call the police and let them
know what homes they are “liberating” to wear down police already busy
with other matters.
Free Love & Women’s Rights
Anarchism
is often in solidarity with free love and women’s rights movements.
Just as anarchism wants an end to the domination of the wealthy over
the poor, it also seeks an end to other forms of oppression such as the
tyranny of the male over the female. Anarchists often are champions of
free love, the voluntary sexual association of individuals rather than
the prescribed and state sanctified sexual union of marriage, as well as
women’s rights such as equal treatment, suffrage, contraception, and
abortion. While this is much more accepted today under state systems,
sexual relations outside of marriage were considered criminal in the
past and remain so in many places today. Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was
a feminist and anarchist who argued the real anarchist and social
revolution should be concerned with ridding society of gender
inequality. Critical of both American capitalism and Soviet communism,
she is considered one of the first revolutionary feminists who hoped
that one day women would be recognized as full individuals who are able
to get married or not and have children or not without the coercion of
the state or culture.
Now
we consider two thinkers who are not only affiliated with anarchism but
increasingly important today: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Both
criticize the way power and information are held in society and the
oppressive nature of human institutions. However, Chomsky is very much a
positivist who believes that there are true human rights and objective
facts while Foucault is very much an existentialist and Nietzschean who
believes that any conception of true rights or objectivity is itself
oppressive in the same way as all human institutions. Both agree that
power as it is practiced today marginalizes the truth, perspective and
reality of the oppressed, but they disagree over whether this is
monstrous or all too human. This is an important debate within not only
anarchism but many other schools of thought. Are human beings always
dominating and marginalizing, or are there just forms of social life
that liberate us from domination? Are there true human rights, or are
human rights another form, perhaps more evolved, of political domination
and control? On the one hand, with positivism, we can agree that there
are human rights and social forms we believe in and push for, but on
the other, with skepticism, we know that America, Britain and the Soviet
Union have paid great lip service to human rights while ignoring and
marginalizing brutality and domination at home and abroad. Either way,
we should push for the good while maintaining skepticism.
Noam Chomsky (1928 – present)
Chomsky,
who has openly declared himself an anarchist, is one of the foremost
critics of American empire and colonialism as was the late Howard Zinn.
He first became famous and secured tenure at MIT in the 50s as a
linguist and philosopher of language with his theory of universal
grammar, also called x-bar y-bar theory (essentially, that there are
basic structures of grammar inherent to all human language such that
ancient Chinese has nouns and verbs just like modern English). In the
late 60s, he gained far more fame across many academic disciplines and
the reading public as a critic of the Vietnam war and American empire.
One of his most famous books is Manufacturing Consent (1988) that he
co-wrote with Edward Herman, which argues that the American mass media
maintains silence about the brutality of our military, corporations and
allies while repeatedly putting the brutality of our enemies and
opponents on display. For example, TV news programs and newspapers
devoted many minutes of airtime and inches of print discussing
suppression of dissent in communist countries while maintaining media
silence about the same forms of suppression here at home and in Central
and South America.
Chomsky
states that all forms of authority and domination should be challenged
and if the forms are unjustifiable they should be dismantled. Chomsky
clearly has the political, economic, and military domination of America
over much of the rest of the world in mind. Because power is by nature
domineering and potentially abusive, the burden of proof should be on
the authority itself to justify its own existence and importance.
Chomsky is consistently critical of academic journals maintaining
silence as he is of the mass media, arguing that even left-wing
academics are either brainwashed into believing that the West and
America stand for freedom and democracy in the face of the evidence he
collects or know what not to say and practice self censorship to
maintain and advance their careers. Chomsky criticizes forms of
democracy and libertarianism as practiced in America and Britain that
give property rights overriding support (like Locke) while maintaining
silence about poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor, as well
as Soviet communism for being an enemy of true socialism. Chomsky
argues, unlike Foucault, that there is a true human nature and that
unjust institutions contradict and violate this nature, however he does
also say that we do not know enough about human nature to know whether
it is basically anarchistic and libertarian or oppressive and
domineering. In other words, he hopes that Mencius is right but we do
not know enough to rule Xun Zi out.
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault
is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in
philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. He
also taught briefly at Berkeley. His books are critical historical
studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons,
psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a
Nietzschean (a follower of Nietzsche, who we will study next class
along with how some Nazis misused his philosophy) and his critical
philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what
is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as
evil. The famous story is that Foucault went on vacation to the
Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and
then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche.
As
a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or
objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad,
true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a
struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations.
Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and
pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth.
This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion,
science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy
historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured.
For
Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for
Nietzsche truth is always involved with desire. We have all heard
‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not
only power, it is domination. He states that truth is not outside
power, but is a thing of this world. Foucault studies the complicated
historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance
shifts to become another form as circumstances change. A dominant theme
of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to
police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them
that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse describes
something similar in One-Dimensional Man.
Thus,
science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing
itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes
that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a
magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of
various forms of truth that compete with each other. However, Foucault
believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater
understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive,
marginalizing, and ignorant.
Power
is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is
the form of the good. Thus, communists who declare themselves to be
liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society
are also helping to oppress themselves through fear and desire. Human
nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together. While not openly
calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of
authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left
wing thought. His conception of power is very similar if not identical
to anarchist criticisms of society.
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