Prophetic Men and Music

I am happy to say that I've got A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall pretty down pat. I just played it again after a few days not and made it all the way through without reading or stopping, which started one of the more satisfying rounds of music I've had in a while. Sometimes you get in a mood that you just don't want to change, but all things have a right ending. I played a few songs in between - an old original that has never been better, free falling (for old times sake, one of the first songs I learned on guitar freshman year - I remember being corrected on the strumming of part of it but just not getting it at the time), Josh Ritter's Potter's Wheel (another hard one to remember, though not quite as bad as Dylan's), and finally, just playing around with the sounds of the guitar and coming up with something right and letting it naturally end. I remember once seeing a spiritual show - I was recruited to help out ushering through someone I met at work - in a giant church in west downtown-ish Portland, by that long park with the statue fountains. There was chanting in sanskrit and spiritual sing alongs to lines like 'there is so much magnificence...near the ocean...near the ocean...' and I think my favorite part was when the husband (of the husband and wife duo) started playing a Beatles song and the wife wasn't too happy about it. (They also had an amazing young Indian-flute player.) But they were big on letting their songs fade out into complete silence; there was no clapping to cover that moment. They went so far as to say that that was the point, or the best part, which they probably meant (it was something to do with the spiritual part, I suppose). All this to say it is nice to play music alone and almost unheard so you can sustain the mood even after.
I wanted to follow up the last post about the Hard Rain with a quote from Nietzsche about prophetic men. Why? A lot of what I like about that song is its almost biblical feeling of prophecy - the young man comes home with mysterious insights which are portents to him of a certain kind of future. There's something powerful in prophecy, or at least in the ability to appear prophetic, which makes it something desirable - like, ooh, I would like to be like that. I'd like to write that kind of song, I'd like to make that kind of work of art (예술품), I'd like to be that kind of person. Enter Nietzsche with a response to this kind of feeling that arises in the admiring spectator. The passage is from the Gay Science (316):

Prophetic men.--You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic men are men who suffer a great deal: you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful "gift," and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity of the air and clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example (as may be observed even in Europe, and not only in zoos--namely, on Gibraltar). But we do not heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly changes into negative electricity, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: they do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel.

I like this passage - it's a good reprimand, and it is somehow comforting to think that prophetic men had to suffer for their 'gift' and didn't just get a handout in it - it makes the world seem both more expansive (there are whole feelings we don't know) and more just (if they had to suffer, they earned it). I also like the parable he uses to illustrate it just in itself - the idea that animals can predict the weather because they feel the pain from it, they feel it as an enemy - a good imaginative leap on N's part (more feelings we have no idea of), and dramatically-written. I'm curious about the pseudo-scientific reasoning he gives for it - a cloud's strong positive electrical charge suddenly changing to electricity to cause animal pain? Is that explanation really dated or naive or does something along those lines happen? (I clearly know no science.) And finally, I like that there actually are monkeys in Gibraltar, in England, and that Nietzsche took the trouble to point out that he knew this. I wonder, did he actually go there to look at the monkeys? Imagine that scene, complete with the spectacles and mustache. Or, as is more likely (and less funny), did he just hear an account of the monkey-viewing from an acquaintance or friend? Finally, telling us at the beginning of the passage that we "have no feeling for that fact that" prophetic men suffer humanizes them and is a call for us to feel compassion for them rather than applaud them as a phenomenon. I remember somewhere else in Nietzsche's corpus (I'm not going to bother finding out where) he characterizes the artist or poet more generally as one who suffers and tries to communicate his pain, only to be met by cheers and enthusiasm for it. It's an idea I've come across before - take one of Dylan's later great albums, Blood On the Tracks - he names it that for a reason. Those are some of the most pain-filled songs I know. "You're a Big Girl Now" "If You See Her Say Hello" and "Buckets of Rain," for instance. And a more living case - I once worked at a show for a singer-songwriter named Ellis, who was one of the most engaging performers in that between songs, she talked a lot and laughed like a dork in a way that made people happy and really like her. Her audience loved her, anyway. During the show, after a round of making everybody laugh, she said that she was so surprised at a show earlier that week when an audience member approached her and asked her how she could be so happy all the time. She didn't know she appeared that way, and told that girl something like, "Happy? Are you kidding? I was crying my eyes out an hour ago!" And everybody, her included, laughed about that one too.
Anyway, it's all well and good to wish to be prophetic, wish to be an artist, wish to be profound, what have you. But it's also good to recognize that in order to avoid being fake or superficial about it, to avoid pursuing an image of it (imagining yourself from an audience's point of view), going with this wish is also being okay with being unhappy for a lot of it. Maybe one does not want to suffer that much for it, maybe one is not strong enough to do so, and there's something to be said for that, too.
But the best part was about the monkeys on Gibraltar. It cracks me up that Nietzsche made a point of that. Apparently they're called Barbary Macaques, they don't have tails, and it is theoretically punishable by law to feed them.

The Antichrist

I recently finished reading the Antichrist, one of Nietzsche’s last books. Oftentimes Nietzsche asks to be read slowly and carefully, but this particular book seemed to have a torrential pace and I had to read it really quickly, like each section pushed me onto the next section and it was hard to stop. Turns out he also wrote it really fast: it was “the work of so few days that I hesitate to mention how many,” (Ecce Homo). By the end I feel like it got less controlled, more repetitive and not as exciting. But on my first sitting I was basically riveted and he puts his ideas very clearly and forcefully.

I can't summarize the whole thing, but it's mainly a invective of Christianity as an insidious subterranean conspiracy born of weakness and envy and revenge against everything that is healthy, powerful, and privileged. It's kind of ridiculous at times and also can sound anti-semitic because of his insistence that Christianity is the culmination of Jewishness, but it's good to remember here that he was writing in an environment full of fanatic Christian anti-Semites (like his sister) and this was a knife-twisting irony at their expense. Along the way he talks about all sort of things, including pity, Kant, the French Revolution, Buddhism, Jesus, the Gospels, the fall of the Roman Empire, the law of Manu, the Renaissance and Luther. As he's denouncing, at least/especially in the beginning, you get a sense of the type and way of thought way outside of Christianity from which he is speaking and this positive element sustains the reading more than anything for me.

The part about Buddhism was fascinating to me because he usually doesn't talk about it explicitly but mentions it really cryptically in passing so it's hard to tell what he thinks about it. Here he actually spends a few passages on it, and it compares so favorably to Christianity that it almost reads as an endorsement. He says Buddhism fulfills where Christianity only promises, Buddhism is a hundred times more truthful by talking in plain terms of suffering rather than sin, he expresses admiration for its lack of prayer, asceticism, and compulsion, he likes its practical focus on the individual (how can I stop suffering?), and even says "Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case." He is still not a Buddhist because he believes it is also nihilistic, meant to help those who suffer from life, but it's interesting to see how much he admires it. His interpretation of Jesus was really interesting too (he definitely does not equate Jesus' teachings with what ended up being Christianity) but I don't want to get into it now. My summaries are bound to be pretty superficial and slightly misleading anyhow.

Anyway, I don't think the Antichrist is Nietzsche's best book but I'm glad I read it. I don't remember whether or not I read it for my Nietzsche class long ago; if I did I forgot it all. But he leaves no room for doubt about his position on Christianity; he ends by calling it "the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough" and even "the one immortal blemish of mankind." And then, because he's ridiculous, after lamenting that we reckon time from the beginning of this 'calamity', the first day of Christianity, he says, "why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!" and that's how he ends the book: why not mark this moment the beginning of time because I say so? Of course, he didn't go around erasing calendars after that and it probably occurred to him in the heat of the moment, but it gives you an idea of how seriously he took the importance of his thought.

Unfortunately he never quite finished. The Antichrist was to be the first of four books that together would make up the grand work called The Revaluation of All Values. As it was, he had a mental breakdown and went permanently insane upon seeing a driver beating a horse in Turin a little more than three months later. That didn't stop him from writing two more books (an autobiography and an edited compilation) in between.

Incidentally, for those of you who were not previously aware, we are now on the 21st day of the 120th year on the Immoralist's Calendar. I guess it'd still be a Monday.

Falsification

And now, the blog turns again to that guy with the mustache, Nietzsche. He has resigned from the professorship he'd held for a decade at Basel and has been living off of the pension writing books for a couple of years. He is about thirty seven years old and he is writing what he will later call his most personal work of philosophy, almost like a journal, called the Gay Science - cheerful, even silly at times, highly naturalistic, and right on the edge "of something incomparable" (according to Nietzsche later). It is made up of four major sections called "books," and the fourth book ends with the beginning of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he writes with such inspiration that he feels that Zarathustra "overtook" him. It is his first attempt at expressing his whole philosophy. The first two parts of Zarathustra were written the following winter and the summer, the third part the following year, and the fourth part (privately published and distributed to only seven friends) the year after. His next book is Beyond Good & Evil, his attempt to say "the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently...very differently", around the same time beginning to look back over, republish, and write new prefaces for his early books. This is the period on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis. He writes yet another book, Genealogy of Morals, as a clarification of Beyond Good & Evil, republishes with a new preface his third book, the Dawn, and finally, gets back to his fourth, the Gay Science, with which I started this post. This is when he publishes a second edition, not just with a new preface, but with an added fifth book, which instead of being like a journal has been popular among philosophers because its more argumentative and traditionally philosophic subject matter. The whole Gay Science hangs together, of course, but you can see what distance there is between the publishing of the first four books of it and its fifth! Three of his most famous works and a self-re-evaluation of all the books before it! Three huge attempts to communicate a philosophic world view that he hadn't had before! Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, new prefaces to his previous works, and the Genealogy of Morals all lie in between the first four books and the fifth book of the Gay Science.
There's a point to all this, I swear. Skip ahead just over a century to a Nietzsche scholar named Maudemarie Clark, currently a professor at Colgate University. She was and still is regarded as one of Nietzsche's top scholars because of her highly acclaimed 1990 book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which was reportedly so good that it "continues to serve as the gold standard for studies of its kind." In this book, she argues that a huge strain of Nietzsche's thought - his apparent radical anti-realism and skepticism about logic, math, science and even everyday objects - can all be explained away as part of a "falsification thesis" that Nietzsche develops early in his career and later gives up. Whew! This means we can bring him into the fold a bit...though he did debunk the ridiculous notion of an otherworldly, metaphysical truth, he still believes in the more modest, everyday notion of limited, empirical truth that we all rely on. The only problem with this: the crux of her argument, the entire PROOF or TEXTUAL BASIS of her argument, relied on the mistake of thinking that the fifth book of the Gay Science, from which her main example of this early "falsification thesis" came from, was written and published BEFORE his main works in which he reached his mature philosophical thought (and to say it again, although the first four sections of the Gay Science came earlier, the fifth was undeniably written AFTER Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals - his "mature" thought). In fact, the very passage that Clark cites as her main evidence, as THE passage in which Nietzsche realizes that he must give the falsification thesis up, is in Beyond Good & Evil, written and published before her main example of the "early" and problematic "falsification thesis" of the 5th book of the Gay Science.
Can you imagine how incredulous I felt when I discovered this as a fresh-faced young undergraduate? That one of the top Nietzsche scholars in existence, in one of the most influential books on Nietzsche in recent times, in an extremely influential interpretation, argued that a "later" passage showed that he gave up the views of an "earlier" passage up...and got the order switched up? That the passage that she needed to come after actually and undeniably, as a matter of historical fact, came before?
And I lied when I said that this was the only problem...there were plenty others, including the fact (pointed out in an article by Prof. Nadeem Hussain, now at Stanford) that the supposedly early "falsification" claims seem to appear elsewhere in the same book, Beyond Good & Evil, in which he supposedly gives it up. Had she just not read the book? Did she just pick this one passage out of context and put it into her argument of what Nietzsche should have said were he smart, or, in Clark's terms, of reading Nietzsche "charitably"? Keep in mind, this is a scholar who ranks as co-translator on an edition of the Genealogy of Morals!!! Shouldn't she know the text? And her response to Hussain, in which she explained away two of the many instances of the falsification claims in that book (saying the others can be 'similarly' explained away by careful interpretation), also seemed to me to be full of bad interpretation, ignorant of context. I disagreed with her interpretation of the crucial passage itself, the one in which he supposedly gives up the falsification thesis. In fact, I thought she was wrong on basically every point and brought forth many arguments and close readings to show it.
I think it's pretty well established that going to a good school and doing well has the danger of giving yourself too much credit. On the basis of this single scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche and fueled by my moral indignation to the wrong it did Nietzsche, I more or less decided that the secondary literature was not worth much reading, and that I would just go back to Nietzsche's text itself and do it right, do it better. Looking back, my actions said, "you so-called scholars are not paying enough attention to what he's writing! You're not getting everything he's saying! Look at me, I'm going to pay so much attention to him that I'm going to spend all year interpreting only these first four passages, two of which you so badly bungled up, of Beyond Good & Evil." It didn't help that my thesis adviser happened to have barely read any Nietzsche, and not since his undergraduate days, so I was always a position of intellectual authority over my professor, who basically helped me by telling me where to clarify and asking questions.

Nowadays if I read some of the secondary literature on Nietzsche from the realm of academic philosophy, the effect is basically humbling. Like, why the hell didn't I read this when I was writing my thesis? For example, John Richardson's extremely well-written introduction the the Oxford Readings in Philosophy Volume easily dealt with some of the things I couldn't figure out how to get across that well in my thesis, especially about how to deal with the apparent antimony between Nietzsche's thought and scholarly/academic philosophy.
It still is a mystery to me, though, whether or not anyone has bothered to point out Clark's chronological mistake in Nietzsche On Truth & Philosophy. Paul Katsafanas (who recently finished his Harvard dissertation on Nietzsche's applications to constitutivism about practical reason in the philosophy of action and mind) deftly sidesteps the issue using a footnote in his "Consciousness and Conceptualization", even though he there provides a better explanation of Nietzsche's 'falsification' claims. Leiter is sympathetic to Clark's basic interpretation but shifts the chronology a bit in his summary of it, and Richardson does something similar in the article I mentioned. None of them gets into the specifics. Richardson also notes that Clark revises the chronology a bit in a later article which I admittedly haven't read, but her response to Hussain postdates that article, and in that response (which is co-authored by David Dudrick) she sticks to saying that Beyond Good & Evil 15 provides evidence that he gives the falsification thesis up. Even more baffling to me was that in that later article (2004) she recognizes in a footnote at the back of the article that the fifth book of the Gay Science postdates Beyond Good & Evil but makes no mention of the fact that this undermines her main evidence for the crux of her interpretation, that Nietzsche gives the falsification thesis up.
At any rate, I'm left wondering whether it is academic politics or politeness that prevented this error from being an academic embarrassment for Clark, or if it has been pointed out somewhere I'm not aware of, or if maybe just nobody really cares. Maybe scholars see it as a technicality, a detail, and still like having her view out there as a possibility in the landscape of possible interpretations of Nietzsche on truth. I guess given how nebulous a lot of philosophy seems to be, with no clear yes or no answers on a lot of things, it would be refreshing for an interpretation to just be refuted and killed. Especially if you're a strange little man who feels like this is important to more than academic Nietzsche specialists in their towers, that Nietzsche has something actually important to say about truth.

"Pure Perspectives" in Nietzsche's Perspectivism

In this entry I want to share a problem I have with Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism. The article of his I cite is almost 15 years old now so it might be a bit dated, but I just want to get it out there. It will start with a summary of some of the main points of the article before I get to the criticism, but I'll keep it short. This may be interesting to anyone who is frustrated with the intellectual laziness encouraged by the prevalence of the "there's no truth, it's all how you look at it" way of thinking. Or anyone who has heard a bunch of hype about Nietzsche's perspectivism and wants to find out more about what he actually wrote.

In “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” Brian Leiter criticizes a reading of perspectivism that he believes “has attained the status of near-orthodoxy among commentators,” (334). He characterizes this "Received View" (RV) as follows:

(i) the world has no determinate nature or character;
(ii) our concepts and theories do not “describe” or “correspond” to this world because it has no determinate character;
(iii) our concepts and theories are “mere” interpretations or “mere” perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts);
(iv) no perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to this characterless world.

Leiter sez: “the Received View cannot be sustained by a close reading of the central text in the work Nietzsche published in which he actually discusses perspectivism: section 12 of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” (335). Before he starts this close reading, Leiter puts up two basic problems with the RV. First, a big part of Nietzsche's philosophy is arguing that other views are mistaken, like when he says something has no basis in experience or that religious and moral interpretations appeal to “imaginary causes." This clashes with his supposed avowal that no perspective can be any more true than any other. Second, in insisting that no perspective can give an account of the world as it ‘really is’, the RV reinstates the distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche famously rejects.

Now let's go to the "central text," GM III:12, which provides evidence against the RV. Leiter notes that instead of presenting truth as something impossible to attain, Nietzsche begins the passage “with an attack on any metaphysics that posits the truth as essentially unknowable, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as a paradigmatic case in point,” (343). And instead of giving up objectivity for relativism, Nietzsche presents a different understanding of objectivity. He writes that “objectivity” should be:

...understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of something that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?— (GM III:12)

The passage proposes an analogy between “knowing” and literal, visual seeing: as seeing is dependent on visual perspectives, so “knowing” is dependent on interests or affects. Leiter spells out the analogy as follows:

In the visual case:
Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more angles we see the object from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim).

In the “knowing” case:
Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (purity claim).

The problem I have with Leiter is with the epistemic purity claim, which Leiter admits is “the most contentious.” He writes, "If we are to have the epistemic purity claim then we must be able to make out something like the following thought: certain interpretive needs and interests distort the nature of objects. We require, then, some criterion for distinguishing nondistorting and distorting needs and interests," (346). What I don't get is how needs and interests could be nondistorting. As I understand it, needs and interests cause us to focus on certain aspects of an experience or situation at the cost of others and to automatically process everything in relation to a certain idea, framework, or agenda, so the perspectives they produce are necessarily partial and unfair. The idea of non-distorting interests is mysterious, and Leiter's speculation as to what the criterion to identify them could be does not clear things up (I'll return to this below).

Moreover, if some perspectives are distorting and others are not, it seems like old Friedrich should tell us to avoid the bad ones and collect the good ones. Indeed, this is how Leiter goes on to qualify the plurality claim: we “can always benefit from additional *nondistorting* perspectives," (Leiter 346). But he does no such thing; in GM III:12 the plurality claim is indiscriminate: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be.” Moreover, he makes it clear that one can learn from perspectives that one considers to be distorting and false. After all, immediately after beginning GM III:12 with “an attack on any metaphysics that posits truth as essentially unknowable,” using something he clearly disagrees with, Kant’s metaphysics, as an example, he writes that we should be grateful to this kind of metaphysical view for increasing our capacity for “objectivity” and thereby aiding us in our search for knowledge. This suggests that we can learn from all perspectives, not just some of them. There seems to be nothing in the passage to support the introduction of this fishy "pure perspectives" idea.

So what led Leiter to introduce it? The worry seems to have been that if all perspectives are misleading and distorting, that would leave no true or reliable perspectives from which we can learn. But I think N's point is precisely that such 'reliable sources' are empty fictions that have no role in a true search for knowledge; this is why he attacks such concepts as pure reasons, contemplation without interest, and knowledge in itself as absurd. I think he might add Leiter's pure perspective to the bunch, and that at any rate we can do without it.

I think we can read this passage as making a simple point: even if each point of view we take up is a partial, simplified, and distorted version of the truth, we can learn from each point of view if we understand *how* it is partial, simplified, and distorted. The more we recognize such interest-driven partiality in the beliefs and practices of ourselves and others, the better we understand those beliefs, the interests that shape them, the people who have them, and the world. Recognizing the partiality will drive us away from our comfortable beliefs to understand and learn from a variety of perspectives, which we can do despite the fact that none of them will give us a pure, nondistorted view into the true nature of the world. This does the opposite of encouraging laziness with beliefs because "it's all just perspective, anyway," by encouraging strenuous effort in understanding and criticizing many points of view, without retracting its attack on the old objectivity's claim to interest-free authority. Though this doesn't necessarily mean it is now understood better, I think that attack on metaphysical objectivity was radical at the time it was written but is seen as pretty commonplace today.


(As a footnote: I said I'd return to Leiter's criterion for telling distorting interests from non-distorting interests, so here we go. After observing that it must be those rare strong individuals who are capable of facing the terrible truth who have those nondistorting interests, he writes that "The mark or criterion of a nondistorting interest, for Nietzsche, is that it is adequate to the “terrible truth” about the world. But that “terrible truth” must be established on other grounds," (347). This would mean we can't know which interests are distorting and which aren't unless we know the truth already and can judge what we epistemically "see" from certain perspectives by comparing it to what we already know. So as you can see, this doesn't help explain how those strong interests could avoid shaping the world in a certain partial way.
Instead of explaining the strong's ability to know the truth by supposing that their strength is constituted by the passive possession of ‘strong, truth-adequate perspectives,’ I think it makes more sense to see their strength as an active ability “to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge.” On this reading, strong people can approach the truth not because of the particular interests or perspectives they happen to have, but because they are able move between and learn from a variety of perspectives.)