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Schirmacher: I want to welcome Fred Ulfers, our secret philosopher at NYU, buried deep down in the German Department.
Ulfers: As all good philosophers should be.
Schirmacher: He's been occupied by too many students, too nice to say no, therefore you haven't see any philosophical book from him, but when he finds the time to free himself from the prison that he likes so much, we will see that he doesn't just have the same first name as Nietzsche, but also some of the same thinking power as this giant of philosophy once had. I invited him here as a philosopher of language who deals today with ethics, as the confusion that a philosopher of language must face when confronted with ethics is at the core of Nietzsche's enterprise. For Nietzsche aesthetics, ethics and language are all part of the same challenge.
Ulfers: The topic of this talk revolves around the notion of ethics beyond good and evil. The reason I chose the title is namely to stress the differentiation between 'ethics' and a 'morality' of good and evil. Nietzsche sees an almost unbridgeable differentiation between ethics and the code of conduct which is run under the morality of good and evil. The way I will use 'ethics' here and the way that Nietzsche alludes it, ethics is ethics if it is concerned with the relationship of self and other in which the other is allowed to remain other. Nietzsche sees any ethics under the signature of morality as a conforming to a code of conduct, even to a general good, in terms of a violence towards the singular other. So then, Nietzsche says that with the death of God we can mark the end of the moral interpretation of the world under the signature of God. The question of meaning will be asked with the death of God which spells the end of the moral interpretation of the world. What I'm trying to say is what Nietzsche brings out, also often misunderstood, namely that insofar as God is the high point of any code of conduct that achieves meaning via the dualism of good and evil, discovering the death of God leaves a voided, empty space, which leads to nihilism. The belief that the truth of the world consisted in the good values of permanence and essence, in short this supreme value of being, self-presence, permanence, has been taken away. In a moral interpretation of the world we do have this authentic meaning opposed by a world of evil values, namely the values of impermanence and non-being, summed up as becoming. Now, did God die a natural death or was he somehow killed? We will see that it is the latter, but it's more complicated than that, who killed him? The dichotomization of the world into sides, one, the good of being beyond or meta- the other one of the evil of becoming, is a metaphysics based on the faith of opposite values which fostered a truthfulness, a being true to the good as ultimate meaning by striving towards it and simultaneously exorcising evil. The cultivation of truthfulness as a concomitant of metaphysics, and here we get into what killed God, leads to the realization that we lack the least right to posit a beyond or an in-itself that might be 'morality incarnate', an absolute good emblematized in Western metaphysics by the Platonic notion of being, and in the Platonism for the people, namely Christianity, by God.
What Nietzsche is alluding to when he speaks of the lack of justification for the metaphysical moralizing view of the world is the fact that over the course of two thousand years of metaphysics, the pursuit of its truth, that is, being, as some transcendental center, or absolute stability or constancy, has come to nought, nihil. In this vein Nietzsche cites such examples as the Copernican Revolution and the energetics of the nineteenth century, the former decentering the universe and the latter de-essentializing it, leaving us with forces or energy events as constitutive of the world rather than things or being, much less a thing-in-itself. I'm alluding here to the energetics of the nineteenth century which is the anticipation of Einstein's discovery of the convertibility of solid matter into energy events. His formula E=mc2 no longer gives us the certitude of a solid foundation of matter composed of atomistic material particles. When I speak of these events in science, such as the Copernican Revolution, which say that nothing is steady and everything is in flux, I'm alluding to Nietzsche's acquaintance with science, which by the way is a kind of pursuit of metaphysics. Newtonian science was interested in discovering, beneath changing phenomena, the rock solidness of atoms. The idea that the universe is without a fixed star that would be both the signifier of a grounding and a horizon to which one can orient oneself spells disaster. I mean disaster in the sense Blanchot uses it, it's the dis-aster, i.e. the vanishing of the guiding star that leaves us without orientation, without the idea of where from and where to. It's that horizonlessness that Nietzsche of course alludes to in the parable of the death of God. The very truthfulness incited by the truth that rested in being is what Nietzsche sees as somewhat ironical, but at the same time as a logical consequence of metaphysics. If something is posited as absolutely true in the face of changing phenomena, then there is the incentive of truth-finding, namely the absolute truth. In science and in other endeavors where we preceded with this truth-finding we are discovering that, even in the hard sciences, there is at least a question about the solidity that was presupposed as a meta-world to the world of changing phenomena, a fickle world and in that sense lying and immoral. The idea of lying has to do with a central instability of things and of the signifiers that refer to them. I'm alluding to On Truth and Lying…, the idea that we associate language with a correspondence theory of truth, where the signifiers that are somewhat unstable nevertheless are stabilized by the security of one meaning, i.e. one truth, only one sense making sense. When Nietzsche speaks about the death of God, he is of course alluding to what might be called an encroaching atheism, a loss of faith on the religious level, but it's more important to him to note that there are other quasi-religious or at least metaphysical enterprises such as science that hunt for the truth which is always emblematized by being, such as the foundational aspect that atoms would have. This leads to the following: If we have found out via our truthfulness that there is no-thing where there was supposed to be something, the question of sense will arise, as well as the question of a nihilism that spells the disaster and the concomitant despair which in German would be Verzweiflung. What was supposed to be one has become two - zwei. Which puts us in the severest of doubts. Always this double, where we wanted and thought there was one solid foundation or a given. The arrival at this nihil or no-thing as the result of the search for supreme being or thing leads to the following question: does not the loss of the thing-in-itself that is absolute constancy and self-presence that represents the moral good-in-itself mean the loss of meaning of the world, and consequently lead to the question 'whether existence still had any meaning at all?' Now, what has interested me in this rumination of Nietzsche's 'death of God', regarding the arrival of a nihil which leads to nihilism, is that he recognizes that from a certain metaphysical vantage point, from a world view that always sees a foundational or teleological aspect meta- the world below, that this death would indeed be the source of nihilism as despair. What I'm trying to show today here is that this nihilism which from one perspective is the source of despair might be not a reconstruction of a code of good vs. evil but the precondition of a possibility of ethics in terms of a relation to otherness that is allowed be other. That is, in this relation to other, without the other always being reduced to self, and thus winding up in a non-relation or in a selfish relation. In this vein, this hunch that I have that Nietzsche is structuring nihilism in his philosophizing as a possibility for an ethics rather than a morality which overlooks the relation of self and other, what I'm interested in is that in Nietzsche's genealogical critique of the morality of good and evil, he shows that this morality was never a two-value, two-world dualism inherently inscribed in the world, but an interpretation in the sense of constructing a moral world whose good, the permanence and solidity of being, is sanctified or maximized as value. A value in Nietzsche's view is good because it is good for the survival of selves. The stable identities of individuals living in a group, as well as of meanings for the ease of quick communication, this constitutes the value of being, stability of identities and the solidity of signifiers with reference to their meanings. The oppositional value to this good for a community and its members is namely that which would be nonconforming in terms of the sameness of the group, and that nonconforming would be declared harmful and evil. It's the requirement of a community, for the sake of identities within the means of communications and identities in terms of the members of the group. Nietzsche ascribes the construct of moralized life to a compulsion in humankind to construct 'a world of identical cases for the utility of preservation of a group, class or species.' What he's presenting to us is a kind of biological theory of epistemology and ontology. What do I mean by biological? The life of humankind requires the utilitarian program, what is of use and therefore good for us in terms of stability and identity. In other words it is humankind and its style of life which constructs on top of the given, which is other than the construct, a fictional world which is then presented in the framework of true versus false. Since this compulsion to construct this identity takes place, Nietzsche argues, in confrontation with the given world that knows no identities [Nietzsche says 'there are no likes in nature', everything is unlike, even unlike to itself], but only beings intrinsically unlike themselves or other in the sense of irreducible to self, Nietzsche views this construction, which is the very nature of sensory perception and the intellect, as will-to-power. When he speaks of will-to-power he is not speaking about a political grab for power. It's settled much much deeper in our very nature of being human, namely that there is a drive which is embodied by sensory perception with the aid of the intellect to reduce that which is unlike between whatever the opposites will be ex post facto. After the reduction, this drive is a will to power because it empowers positions, human existence, on a firm grounding as opposed to that which is not firmly grounded. It's not some ethereal receptivity which receives these values, these moral values, these codes that revolve around good vs. evil from some meta-place, it is the human brain that is hardwired, if you will, with a program that enables to construct solidity vs. the non-solid on top of no 'foundation' whatsoever. It's a phantasm that amounts to misreading of nature, a text of unlikes, as likes. Nietzsche, in addition to calling the rationalization of irreducible singularity a construct in the sense of fiction, points to the inherent violence of identity construction done to the singularity's alterity. By alterity I mean this always-already unlikeness of the singularity. Unlikeness doesn't mean that a self, a singularity was first 'like' and then somehow became other to itself, it is the very unlikeness that is misread for the sake of some need for a utilitarian program which revolves around being versus the instability of becoming. Change, time and temporality are all features of the given world that would produce the notion of change and change-ability. If all so-called things are at bottom events, i.e. happenings, we cannot speak of likeness. If everything is always-already in process, we cannot speak of solids. To read fictionally into a world of change, temporality, unlikeness, that ability which is a part of the hardwiring of humankind, that ability to produce, create or construct solids, foundational values, teleological values where there are none, this is what Nietzsche calls the will-to-power. First he calls it fictional, it's an interpretation, secondly, where other philosophers have spoken of the most peaceable values that we have received from a higher sphere, he call its actually a violence. It is with this second move, regarding the loss of a moral world that associates good with identity as the self-sameness of being, that is accomplished with violence perpetrated on beings that as alterities are intrinsically open to otherness, that Nietzsche demasks the morality of good and evil as unethical. What I'm trying to say here is that when a metaphysical culture i.e. the culture of classical Enlightenment sees in the very rationalization of the world the greatest good even in terms of a peacefulness, Nietzsche sees this as violence, as a will-to-power, because he unmasks it as a violence done to the given unlikeness of the world, which is why this constructability is unethical. It violently produces the good out of an interpretation of singularities, which are always unlike themselves, are other than to themselves, and thus structurally related to otherness. Singularity as alterity is inherently ethical since it is structurally being irreducibly unlike itself, open to otherness as otherness. Perhaps I should comment on myself. Thereby making myself unlike. I'm forming the ethical relation, even in my very commentary. All I'm trying to say here is that if there is a given world of unlikeness, and that's what Nietzsche is taking as a given, then you do not ever have the possibility of an identity that by definition is self-sufficient, closed up, no relation to otherness. It's the a priori rupture prior to any identity formation that Nietzsche will see, at least implicitly, as the very space for ethics, if by ethics we mean relation to otherness. This reduction of unlikeness for the sake of the herd and its requirements, namely a morality that revolves around identity formation that would exclude anything that disrupts identity, that this a violence to ethicality, that's what Nietzsche is attempting to say when he locates the constructability in terms of a world of good and evil in a drive that he calls will-to-power. I harp a little on this because will-to-power is still misunderstood as an empirical will to assume or grab for power. Will-to-power can be interpreted that way if we read this term out of the context of Nietzsche. Nietzsche makes sure to emphasize that will-to-power is embedded in our very cognitive apparatus, so that all cognition is valuable as long as it produces identities. I say produces identities because prior to Nietzsche cognition meant that you simply received identities into your mind, there was an outer identity that simply had to be passively received into your brain, it was in other words the reflection theory of the real, or the correspondence theory of truth. What Nietzsche is saying is that whatever the outside might be, and Nietzsche tells us it is 'unlike itself', this unlikeness is constructed as likeness. This has to do with utilitarianism, for practical group living, it is good for group living to have manipulable things that would be out of form altogether, as every unlike is. Confronted with a given world of unform, and needing forms, the human brain is endowed with a capability of constructing identities in oppositional relation, creating thereby a moral system, because the higher value will always be seen as the good in opposition to something that is evil. That is what Nietzsche has in mind when he speaks of the moral interpretation of the world, a making-moral, not a receiving of a world that is already moralized into good and evil. I feel Nietzsche is making two moves with regards to the will-to-power. On one hand, he situates the politics of power at the very heart of the rational and the cognitive, and at the same time he tells us that this power play perpetrated by our cognitive apparatus is thoroughly fictional compared to the given. The location, the situating of will-to-power in what we have always received as the very rationality and the highest values in philosophy and in life in general Nietzsche is unmasking as a kind of power politics at the very heart of the rational. So the insight into fictionality and its concomitant nihilism, that fictionality which amounts to a kind of phantasm, is that this construct is indeed a pure fiction compared to the given but necessary for the empowerment of human existence in groups, it is the 'herd morality.' This fictionality is not created out of something but indeed created by misreading, overlooking, ignoring, marginalizing something, and its concomitant violence does not mean that it can be changed from within that structure. That's the tricky part. The insight into the fictionality, the nihilism of the construct derived from this will-to-power cannot be changed by simply saying 'Oh, let's change, why not.' The reason is, as Nietzsche maintains following Darwin, is that will-to-power as the will-to-construct identities is equivalent to the drive of self-preservation in the context of a group. In other words, the will-to-power as the will-to-identity is not a will that is subject to conscious suasion, though it manifests itself ostensibly as conscious in the form of cognition. So we have a paradox here. What we perceive as consciousness, i.e. perception and cognition, is precisely not conscious. It is part of a drive structure as Darwin posited when he speaks about the drive to self-preservation. By situating apparently conscious phenomena on the level of drives, Nietzsche shows the incorrigibility of cognition regarding its comprehension of incomparable, irreplaceable singulars as self-contained selfsame beings. Since the will-to-power is part of our hard-drive which 'masks' itself as intellect and sense perception, it would be foolhardy to simply preach change, to say 'don't ignore the singulars.' What may look easy given the insight into will-to-power is possibly impossible given that this will-to-power is situated on the level of the drives. How do you change drive structures, that's the question. What I'm hinting at already is that there must be, in order to circumvent this construction of identities, a way out of this paradigm that's not dictated by a drive. When I'm talking about the incorrigibility of the very drive of cognition, that is not to say, as Nietzsche will point out throughout his philosophizing, that there's not a manner of circumventing, by other means than the means of will-to-power, this identity-constructing drive. When I said 'selfsame, self-contained beings' the notion of being is important here because it's not an aspect of the givenness of a self but the result of the violence of simplification and falsifaction of the singular, whose otherness can never be reduced to the 'is', the self-presence of being, since it is radically temporal, eventlike, continual transitoriness and fleetingness. Here we have a hint at what for Nietzsche is the 'given'. Nietzsche was a philosopher but he was also an avid reader of other disciplines, including science. The idea of event-like structures, continual transitoriness and fleetingness, is not merely the product of Nietzsche's febrile imagination but I would venture to say the result of his interest in other disciplines, particularly of science. I'm thinking here of Lange's 'History of Materialism' which Nietzsche lauded in letters as one of the most valuable books he had ever read. It's a nineteenth-century description of how the notion of matter was viewed over the centuries, and contained a reference which I'm sure must have intrigued Nietzsche. The environment that surrounds us, writes Lange, is undoubtedly an environment of 'ceaseless vibrations', vibrations in the sense that we don't have 'things' that vibrate, we have vibrations, rhythmical events. I don't mean to make any facile analogies here, and if I'm facile forgive me, but it's intrigued me that a recent book has revived a theory that was dormant for some years, namely the idea of string theory. One thing I have understood about string theory is that it revolves around the universe as strings, vibrations. I only want to show you that Nietzsche was becoming aware of the radical paradigm shift pertaining to the solidity of matter, as another version of foundationalism already put into question by science itself. The reconfiguration of the 'given' that I'm alluding to is to focus on its ec-stasis, its othering and its finitude, all of which are structural aspects that can only be rendered as the self-presence of 'is' as 'self-ish' by the arresting power of cognition. There is implicit in this self-ishness a certain morality over against a morality of structural unselfishness tied to continual transitoriness and fleetingness, always othering, therefore out of self, into other, or out of other and into the self. That which is constant, permanent, which promises use eternity in contrast to the corrupted eternity that we call temporality. Time is only a way-station to the permanent. Could it no be that with a changing paradigm, which is what Nietzsche is interested in, even in the physical sciences, that over time, our worldview might change in terms of a value system. When Nietzsche talks about the transvaluation of all values, he's not necessarily saying 'I'm the Great Nietzsche who has the power to transvalue all values', but that there's a transvaluation of values already going on in terms of this paradigm shift. Now, regarding the ethicality of this shift, what Nietzsche indicates is that at the level of selfsameness, of ego being, which a totality demands as a moral good for the sake of its smooth functioning, which must exclude the alterity of singularity, altruism as a relation to the other as other is not possible. Not because of a lack of goodness, but because of the will-to-power as a power of comprehending of the other as same-being suffuses and thus subverts any altruism. This is even the case when the members of a group are ready to sacrifice themselves when the totality they identify with is in danger. Here the feeling of power that is concomitant with the power of excluding that which threatens identity, namely the other as other, contaminates the very altruism of sacrifice. The feeling of power, insofar as one belongs to a strong, chieftain family community, we subject ourselves under such a structure so that we have a feeling of power. Whoever is disinclined towards the fatherland has nevertheless in moments of danger a drive towards sacrifice for the fatherland. He doesn't want the feeling of Unpower. So the singularity of never having a position, because it's always in and out, is in many ways the signifier of the unpower that goes with that ethics. You're always other than self, structurally speaking. It is this structural unpower which according to Nietzsche must inform altruism, not because Nietzsche is into 'love thy neighbor', that's all crap. Not out of some disinclination towards the other, or hatred towards the neighbor, but because it's structurally not possible. What Nietzsche implies is that the ethical relation which the singular as alterity is, is an unbearable relation because the a priori implication of the chaismic unity of the other-in-self, self-in-other that is constitutive of this singularity's non-self-being is perceived as an excess, a rupture, an out-of-jointedness compared with any symmetrical reciprocal relation between identities. Unpower. The latter structure, namely relation between identities, is as Nietzsche puts it, demanded by the herd as a moral duty. It is the 'pflicht of Kant's categorical imperative that makes responsibility to the common good morality incarnate.' As Nietzsche sees it, this pflicht is a flight into responsibility as accountability in terms of contractual relations in which the ethical is the balancing of accounts. It is a flight from that responsiveness to the other that is always-already given with the out-of-selfness of singularity, a responsiveness that welcomes the other as other, welcomes the stranger prior to and in excess of any accountability and reciprocity. A duty, pflicht, in that it is the primordial plight, pflicht, derived from Verflechtung, or 'interlacing'. So the primordial duty is not a command from some high-on place like the categorical imperative. It is constitutively the plight of the one into the other, and the other into the one. Pflicht, in the sense of an entanglement of self and other, this interlacing or chaismic unity, is the very space of ethics as it constitutes a relation to otherness without the possibility of synthesis that would violate the other's otherness by reducing it to sameness, same-being. The flight from this first ethics into the morality of identities that have relations of reciprocity and accountability among each other signifies the feeling of unpower from the perspective of the power associated with autonomy and independence, a feeling that leads the abandonment of ethics for the sake of the morality of good and evil.
Schirmacher: Now I think this is the time to relate some of your stuff to philosophers after Nietzsche. Let's start with myself. In my discussion of the Homo generator you remind me that I have to go back to Whitehead in terms of the singularities and the process, to understand that the self-itself has nothing to do with selfishness, it is these singular events. I would say there is a hardwiring beneath the hardwiring you describe as our perceptual apparatus, and this hardwiring is how we 'generate' the world as singular events. The easiest thing in the world for us should be to be altruistic, it's amazing that it's not the case, to be altruistic to ourselves, because the next time we are already others, so the perspective of the others is, if you look very closely, the perspective of yourself. My first question to you is to comment on the connection to Whitehead. The second philosopher would be Adorno, he really made a very strong point against thinking as identifying-thinking, what interests me there is not so much the analysis but his idea of the 'way out'. This 'way out' is a thinking against itself, not just a mere criticism, but a criticism of the thinking style itself. It's possible to do, but amazingly hard. You know Deleuze and his rhythm thinking, that would be his 'way out'. So we are collecting philosophers after Nietzsche who are also trying to find this way out. The fourth philosopher would be certainly Levinas with the Other, there I would also like to know what you have to say, Levinas' 'Other' is not my other, there is somehow the divine, the gods in this other, it is the other with the big 'O', so to speak. Heidegger himself somehow confirmed this will-to-will. Heidegger's way out was a way in — to get out of metaphysics you have to go through it, because in metaphysics itself you find your way out. Go into morality, go into ethics and find there the way out, there was a beginning when it was a life-sustaining thing, find this beginning that you may have a chance.
Ulfers: You're quite right that it's never an overcoming because the way out is really what Derrida would call a kind of 'infrastructure', or quasi-transcendental, to the immanence of selfishness. I'm not speaking of God, even though I'm relying on Levinas quite a bit, but only because I believe that Nietzsche's own text lends itself to a Levinasian take. Although they warned me when I started 'Oh, you're going to Levinasize the whole thing'. I hope I haven't done that. It's that infrastructure that on an ontological I've tried to name by way of speaking of metaphor. Here I'm close to Heidegger in his quotation of Holderlin, 'poetically man dwells upon the earth', i.e. poetically, not by waxing poetry, but by adjusting after metaphysics, after metaphysics, to the poetics of the universe. Again, the universe is to be conceived here as metaphor and thus always already other-directed, always outside of itself, a certain madness, a fine madness, a fine risk, not the risk of being foolish, but of being foolish like a metaphor. I was thinking of that as the way out. Then Nietzsche would of course construct, but differently, 'otherwise than being', as Levinas would put it, because we have to circumvent the language of 'being-ness', of identities, will-to-power not as being nor as its opposite but as pathos of becoming and being, and all other oppositions including self and other. An inherently ethical structure, that's what I was trying to do.
Bois: Did Adorno write on Nietzsche?
Ulfers: Yes he did. In 'The Dialectics of Enlightenment', less so in 'Negative Dialectics'. By the way I think this is still a fertile field to somehow not simply analogize Adorno's dialectics
Bois: It's not a huge passage,
Ulfers: No but it's suffused with the idea of rationality, or reason, i.e. Enlightenment, amounting to 'leichs machen, gleichs setzen.' That's the politics of power situated in our very thinking. So to get to 'unpower', to get away from the violence, is precisely what Wolfgang called 'thinking against thinking.' This thinking is, I say again, metaphorical thinking. Not this namby-pamby poetry, but the suffering in poetic living, the contradiction. It is suffering but it is suffering with a kind of opening up and therefore pleasure.
Schirmacher: Your pathos, that is very nice, I steal it from you. It's better in English, I question how this would work in German, because suffering the consequences, suffering the contradictions, it's also this enduring stuff in there, is this appreciating?
Ulfers: It's what Nietzsche calls, as early as 'The Birth of Tragedy', the Ur-eine which is not the one but is that is both pleasure and pain, in that sense a sublime pleasure. It's a suffering from overfulness, i.e. the overfulness of not being, as Schelling would put it, Bedinkt. The Unbedinkt, the un-thinged by being potentiality which is a tension between being and becoming. That tension between is the creative overabundance that issues in events.
Schirmacher: As a phenomenologist I don't believe in words at all, so try to find here the evidence for that, a feeling that we all should know, we are overwhelmed but at the same time pleased at this excess of life, I see.
Ulfers: It's the vulnerability, that's the openness, the patience that is suffused with pleasure because it is a vulnerability to otherness, it does not shy away from the other as other.
Schirmacher: It's kind of a Greek reading of Schopenhauer's menschenlieber.
Ulfers: yes, but the menschenlieber which is not on the level of selfishness. It's tragic.
Schirmacher: Pathos would allow us, if I understood you right, to have the change, the process, and also our inclination in that, we are not out of becoming…
Ulfers: So Nietzsche is avant la lettre analogizing to some kind of unconscious.
Schirmacher: What he calls the innocence of becoming.
Ulfers: It has to be innocent because there's no suffering from lack which would establish guilt. It's a suffering from overfulness which gives itself as the gift of time and temporality.
Schirmacher: It's outside this need structure which has caused us to make so many stupid moves. You don't need anything, you have everything you just don't know it!
Audience: I think the pathos side of will-to-power is what Jung calls the transcendent function. In the transcendent function there's a tension of opposites which is a ground…
Ulfers: The ungrounding ground. They are always implicit in one another.
Audience: The ground is always moving. This is the core of Jung's difference from Freud's libido theory. This is exactly where Jung finds his strength in his whole project of 'Why do we do what we do?' Why do we do so many things as you say, from the unconscious. It's also the drive that fuels art, and all kinds of creativity, where we level every action, good, bad, doesn't matter, looking at them just as phenomena that arise from the tension of opposites.
Ulfers: But you're not talking about the leveling of differences.
Audience: No, it's just a matter of action. It's the springing out, sometimes it springs out in violence, sometimes in painting. I think it's precisely the will-to-power that leads to this libido theory of springing from the transcendent function which is that tension of opposites.
Ulfers: By the way the whole matter of tension of opposites, and every one thing having its opposite with it if not within it is of course Heraclitus, who says in the beginning, but there's no beginning, in the end, but there's no end, there is, and there is no is, there is contradiction. We might as well say 'contradiction.' or 'contradicting.'
Schirmacher: Many philosophers, including Hegel, have been informed by this, that the opposite is within.
Ulfers: I'm also intrigued that when we speak about Leidenschaft, passion, that that which we deride as not cool is of course structurally an 'into-the-other.' An other-ing. It would be that Leidenschaftunderneath any notion of comprehension of the other, in terms of self. Passion, pathos, that this should be the core of the world, not some super-logos. This could be the way out of an egoism, at least knowing what altruism would be compared to the fake altruism, fake because structurally not possible.
Schirmacher: One hand you said that Nietzsche had this inner inherent criticism of the will-to-power as the will to make things solid. It's also the will-to-power as this aesthetic will-to-power, as the will-to-art, which is the way out. All artwork is inherently pathos, pathetic if you want, it has all this contradiction, it has you, also not you…
Ulfers: You're quite right but I would disagree to the extent that Nietzsche will say that the will-to-power is analogous to the constructivity of Apollonian art. That's ok if we could see will-to-power as constructivity, as always giving us only provisional meanings and constructs. Because will-to-power as life overcoming itself would be precisely also the overcoming of figures, shapes, forms, quasi-beings. But it isn't art, it's only the absolutization of the Apollonian, reading it as permanent truth that Nietzsche rejects. He feels that's going on in a culture of a dualistic morality which has accepted this construct as always-already inscribed in the world. Nietzsche says the world is self-overcoming because it is always into othering and otherness.
Schirmacher: There are many ways to exercise this will-to-power and one way of that was the aesthetic or fictional. Because this is exactly in which the will-to-power undermines it kind of solid position. There is nothing solid in art. Only when will-to-power becomes a political or philosophical enterprise, aiming at a certain conclusion, then it really becomes counterproductive.
Ulfers: Yes, when the products of the will-to-power are read by way of ontology, i.e. as being, then we're misreading the artistry, i.e. the fictionality. Nietzsche celebrates Apollonian art which knows itself as Schein, as fiction. But can we live with that morality as mere fiction, apparently we've not been able to do it because we read it as truth, and that's what he's debunking because of the consequences, because it means shutting out the other as other.
Bois: I was very interested by your etymology of 'despair' in German. It also comes from the same in English, in some way.
Ulfers: It shows us that there is another way of reading, meanings change, and especially in Germany, having been trained as good Kantians, when we say 'flischt' we never think, because it's become opaque, of its more original meaning which alludes to this, plight is flischt. The two languages are cognate languages, it's like knight and knischt, knight in shining armor and knischt, the silver boy, both have horses in common. It's not a false etymology here, I'm trying to show you what Kant uses as flischt would be that duty towards the common good which is absolute from the community. It would be an external relation. Plight, which is also flischt, would be that plight which you cannot help yourself out of. You're always-already in it. You get out of it artificially by fictionalizing.
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