> At 03:55 PM 6/2/97 -0600, you wrote:
> >
> > It should be bourne in mind that the eternal recurrence does not in
> >any way justify existence;
>
> Perhaps you are right, but does this include an earthly existence? While it
> is true that N thought it presumptuous that one should, or could, live
> through all eternity in some otherworldly, didn't he also think that we
> could make our existence worthwhile here on earth. There may not ever be a
> final justification (a final painting) but the process of living is itself
> a justification. The art of living is the art of loving life. Life
> justifies itself and needs no metaphysical help.
>
The otherworldly is for Nietzsche based on a clever and elaborate
psychological denial of this earthly realm; it's based on a negation,
aversion and denial of the harsh and tragic, on passing judgment against
life which as a pose or superior position itself ( as overseer and judge )
is somehow already beyond life and its contingencies. You ask, "didn't he
also think that we could make our existence worthwhile here on earth"
which, with all due respect, begs the question. Why do you feel life needs
to be justified? I know this must sound very counter-intuitive although I
mean to question this very pose, to expose its metaphysical roots, as it
were, as grounded in a desire to pass judgment and ultimately to take
revenge when reality's cruel superfluities and accidents don't live up to
our standards.
> >it's precisely Nietzsche attempt to break from
> >such a hangman's metaphysics that wants to pass judgment on existence. It
> >doesn't justify life because it's an empty, profitless repetition.
>
> "it" meaning the ER? and "it's" meaning life?
"it" in the first instance as the doctrine though strangely either can
be referenced by the final "it's" as in "it is", life or recurrence, an
empty, profitless repetition.
> doesn't an overman type of response include overcoming even this
> "in vain" and creating past it, beyond it?
>
Interesting, but even if one agreed with this would this change the
"in vain"? Would it be erased or overcome, filled with something else, a
new delusion perhaps? The main idea involved here is an evolution in
Nietzsche's thinking from the earliest Schoperhaurian attempts at giving
metaphysical consolation to that coldness and hardness that is the abyss
of the ER.
>
> Doesn't the convalescent by definition need an accumulation upon which he
> can reflect? Is this not the source of the overflow? Isn't the convalescent
> one who has gathered much honey? Doesn't the overman seek experience so
> that he may almost perish of it? And isn't the overman at times a
> convalescent? (What does not destroy me makes me stronger)
>
Yes, no doubt something like this is always taking place even at that
point where accumulation and overflow are almost inseperable, as in
Nietzsche's going into his final mode, the halcyon tone of everything in
his last three or four years of productive work although it would not
return, as work, to him, to his person as their biological origin. This
final mode is a radical aneconomics, as it were.
>
> >There is a
> >radical impotence involved with ER that shakes our grasp upon the
> >"honest, old ego", that makes such a thought unbearable and useless for a
> >moralizing metaphysics, that makes it unreal, unsatisfying but for all
> >that selective.
> >
> >Leonardo Raggo///////\\\
> >ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
>
> A question here: All that was not Greek was barbarian to the Greeks. Could
> the rabble be the same for the overman? One who has experienced the ER, and
> it is an experience at not some intellectual exercise, must look down upon
> the rabble now because the latter must still cling to their petty politics
> and morality and dogma and religion. It this N's elitism?
>
> George
Yes, its anti-moralizing and anti-obligatory which makes mush of these
little excessive claims as to what they "must" do or feel.
Keep Rockin'
Leonardo Raggo///////\\\
ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
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