Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 Book

SARAH KOFMAN's "Nietzsche & Metaphor"

"Just as he multiplies perspectives, so Nietzsche intentionally diversifies his styles in order to save the reader from misunderstanding a single style as a 'style in itself'. [...] Its is as vain to seek to impose a canonical model on writing as it is futile to seek to legislate universally in morality. [...] Tyranny is reprehensible in all its forms, including that of any philosopher seeking to raise his spontaneous evaluation to the status of an absolute value and his style to that of a philosophical style 'in itself'. [...] The game of writing, for Nietzsche, remains subordinate to a new art of interpreting the world, the communication of a new perspective. [...] He was the first to try to translate the 'Dionysian pathos' into a 'philosophical pathos': a translation which was at the same time a transfiguration, a transposition of the 'music of the world' into the imperfect language of the word. [...] A philosophy which, by combining all the 'genres' in its writing, deletes all oppositions with one great burst of laughter." (p. 3-5)

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"It is only the full panoply of the art, in their hierarchized diversity subordinated to music, that symbolizes Dionysus: this god who is dismembered into a thousand pieces and who revives every year, reunified. [...] All authentic art involves intoxication, and with it the loss of the 'proper', as one is transported out of oneself in a way which alone gives power to symbolize. Expressing oneself metaphorically and undergoing a metamorphosis can thus be assimilated. It is this ecstasy outside of the self which is at the origin of Greek music drama, the total art form par excellence. The author of the ancient music drama can be compared to the pentathlete, the virtuoso in five types of sport, and the drama can be symbolized by the floating drapery introduced by Aeschylus: the drama triumphs over all that remained forced and isolated in the different arts; it reconciles discipline and grace, diversity and unity, Apollo and Dionysus." (p. 12)

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"Philosophical language is the most unsatisfactory there is, for it petrifies the 'music of the world' into concepts." (p. 12)

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"Despite everything which still connects Nietzsche's first works to the tradition, their innovatinevess, as far as the status of metaphor is concerned, reveals an original conception of philosophy and of philosophical 'style'. They introduce new relations between philosophy, art, and science. Previously philosophy and science, in the desire to speak 'properly' and demonstrate without using images or similes in order to be convincing, repressed metaphor and confined it to the poetic sphere. The philosopher resorted to metaphor only for didactic reasons... Nietzsche inaugurates a type of philosophy which deliberately uses metaphors, at the risk of being confused with poetry. The opposition between philosophy and poetry derives from metaphysical thinking; it is based on the fictitious separation of the real and the imaginary, on the no less fictitious separation of the 'faculties'. [...] The philosopher does not just 'play' with metaphors: his play is of a 'formidable seriousness', for it is designed to oppose modernity's hatred for art." (p. 18-19)

TO BE CONTINUED...