Monday 23 August 2010

I was bored. I kept on looking outside at the trees and the spring rain lightly falling. I watched the waves rolling across the bay and the birds dart

"In the thought of will to power Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical ground of the consummation of the modern age. In the thought of will to power, metaphysical thinking itself completes itself in advance. Nietzsche, the thinker of the thought of will to power, is the last metaphysican of the West.
The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought, the modern age, is a final age. This means an age in which at some point and in some way the historical decision arises as to whether this final age is the conclusion of Western history, or the counterpart to another beginning. To go to the length of Nietzsche's pathway of thought to the will to power means to catch sight of this historical decision."

"There are people who are genuinely interested in philosophical subjects and eager to discuss it with other enthusiasts, and then there are those that have made an institutional career out of philosophy, and need to please their patrons to get grants, tenure, and get published. And there are the clever few that manage both, getting both the respect of their peers, their books sold in bookstores, and their ideas spread. I don't think there's anything wrong with being published in specialized journals, but in the long run, what's the point of doing philosophy, or anything else for that matter, only to have your work gather dust in a few libraries?"
"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence.
Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept. Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics.
Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom."

The non-conceptual, the individual and the particular. Is not another name for this difference? Can we not see this in terms of Nietzsche affirming difference in opposition to a natural science (and we can add neo-classical economic science) that denies difference in favour of logical identity, mathematical quality and thermodynamic equlibrium? Difference is what is left over as waste matter by the conceptual structure of either economic and natural science
I was bored. I kept on looking outside at the trees and the spring rain lightly falling. I watched the waves rolling across the bay and the birds darting here and there. I struggled to return to the text.

I was annoyed with all the soul stuff that turned it into a mystical experience of ecstasy, revelation and renunciation.
living outside meaning and sense; a mystic caught up in the image of a circle arising out of intense emotional chaos beyond knowledge and communication.
Why is so much fuss made of all this romanticism I kept wondering. It reeks of Bataille and hallucinations.