All posts filed under: Nietzsche

The Future of Culture: or, Beyond Eschatology

Friday, September 14, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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decadence / hope / institution / Nietzsche / nihilism / Politics / religion / socialism

Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence… “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eve for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life… (The Case of Wagner, 51) The social relation requires re-evaluation in light of […]

The Sense for Custom and the Feeling of Power: Nietzsche’s Joyous Denial of the Old Ways

Thursday, September 13, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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custom / force / morality / Nietzsche / Politics / power / society / sovereignty

We should take Nietzsche seriously when he asserts that Daybreak is the work of the subterranean man, one who constantly undermines the foundations of our belief by illuminating the mixed origins from which those beliefs emerge (Preface 1). While Nietzsche indicates briefly that it is the scientist who best represents this figure, the subterranean thinker could stand in general for anyone who conducts thought experiments that examine and dismantle our faith in morality. The active […]

Nietzsche’s Glance at the State: Socialism, Nationalism, Universalism

Thursday, September 13, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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democracy / justice / nationalism / Nietzsche / socialism / universal politics / utopia

In January of 1872, less than a year after Germany officially becomes a nation, Nietzsche gives a series of five lectures at the University of Basel on the future of our educational/cultural institutions. Six years later in section 8 of Human All Too Human we find Nietzsche discussing the future of political institutions and the fate of European nations. One of the questions that Nietzsche asks in his analysis of socialism, nationalism and democracy is […]

Philosophy of the Forenoon

Thursday, September 6, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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Nietzsche / nomad / noon / will

Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured and cheerful face between the hours of ten and twelve–they seek the philosophy of the forenoon. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 638 Human All Too Human) As Nietzsche dramatically presents it, the ‘philosophy of the forenoon’ is that sharpest and most beautiful diamond of the intellect, born of a brave and curiously wandering temperament. To seek it is […]

Politics beyond Ontology

Friday, August 31, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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badiou / Deleuze / guattari / Nietzsche / ontology / Politics / Whitehead

Fractal Cow is made by Gabor Csordas and Gabor Papp and can be found at http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow. Hypothesis in Process Philosophy Abstract It seems that we experience the world: but beyond this, what more can be said? Can we hypothesize the abyssal and incorporeal depths of the origin of social desire, and could description perhaps reach even farther? In this paper, my goal is to provide a reading of the work of Alain Badiou and Gilles […]

‘A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture’: Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

Thursday, August 30, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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aesthetics / culture / Eternal Return / Human All Too Human / Nietzsche / religion / Science / Mathematics / Technology / universal politics

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, […]

Nietzsche and Psychology

Tuesday, August 28, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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creativity / culture / geology / Nietzsche / productivity / psychology

Just as the glaciers increase when in the equatorial regions the sun burns down upon the sea with greater heat than before, so it may be that a very strong and aggressive free-spiritedness is evidence that somewhere the heat of sensibility has sustained an extraordinary increase. Nietzsche (§232, Human, All Too Human) As Nietzsche develops it, the specifically psychological question is already a social investigation, perhaps even close to the anthropological question. The psychologist asks: […]

Nietzsche’s Historical Chemistry and the International Scene

Wednesday, August 22, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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culture / habit / history / institution / Nietzsche / pleasure / Serres / universal politics

“Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You […]

Agency and Chaos

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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chaos / metaphysics / mirrors / Nietzsche / observer / problem space / sense / singularity

(Source: NASA deep space photo) Agency demands a problem-space exactly as motion demands regulated (observed) space. Motion is distinguished from space by an observer: space is energy. Thus the discovery that space-time (energy) is at once both a pure sea of light waves folding and crashing in infinite variations as well as a discrete, orderly series of predefined, probabilistic signals, is one of the two great conceptual leaps of this century. The discovery that energy […]

I’m done watching this

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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coca-cola / enlightenment / media / Nietzsche / nihilism / television

Isn’t it true that the ongoing cinematization of existence occurs in spite of our desire to actually see what is produced? Our joy, our stimulation, lies almost entirely in the (anticipation and moment of the) absolute captivation which video inaugurates. We capture images, and are captured by capturing images; eventually, we only recognize ourselves and others through such images. “Reality” television has a similar structure of addiction. It is more important to record something than […]