Reviews for Acts And Ethics

The average rating for Acts And Ethics based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-26 00:00:00 James Gravil Nietzsche wants to overturn or invert Western morality, culture, religion, and most of all its philosophy where Platonism is at its epitome: My philosophy an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal" (Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig, 1905 ff.), Vol. 9, p. 190, as cited in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 154). Nietzsche wants to overturn Platonism upside down and to do so by polemic. (Note the subtitle of the book, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson; trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1994), 1). Genealogy is his method of critique and inversion; and polemic is his style. The genealogical critique does not look at historical facts or records, as a normal family genealogy would. If it looks at records, they consist of writings of past philosophers, theologians, or literary writers such as Dante or Cervantes. Tertullian is quoted extensively in Latin (32-33) and a sentence from Thomas Aquinas, among others, is explicitly referenced (32)--all these as the symptoms that reveal the underlying origin of the western mores and culture: ressentiment of the slave morality of Christianity. The sentence quoted from Aquinas is indicative of the underlying ressentiment: "The blessed in the heavenly kingdom will see the torment of the damned so that they may even more thoroughly enjoy their blessedness" (Summa Theologiae Supplement to the Third Part, question XCVII, article i, 'conclusio'; the editor points out that some modern editions do not contain the 'conclusio.') The Bible is full of such sayings: Psalm 137:9 for example; or the Book of Revelation (which Nietzsche mentions by title only, saying "the wildest of all outbursts ever written" (35) and confuses its authorship with that of John's Gospel) 6:14-17; 9:6; 16:6, 10-11; 20:10, 15. Note that ressentiment has nothing to do with the writer's intention. Christians are not resentful people. On the contrary, they are (or desire to be) meek, peaceful, and loving. But--here is Nietzsche's point--these Christian 'virtues' are nothing but a disguise, deep-seated and repressed ressentiment, of which they are not even aware as harboring. Ressentiment, therefore, is no ordinary 'resentment' (which is a perfect translation of the French word, of which the English definition is: "the feeling of displeasure or indignation at some act... regarded as causing injury or insult" (Random House Dictionary at dictionary.com). Nietzsche uses French word in order to create a new vocabulary of his own. (One must be on guard whenever a philosopher invents a vocabulary to suit his own purpose! Plato's 'form,' eidos (the 'look' of things), is another example of a philosopher appropriating a common word for his own particular use that proves to be controversial for centuries thereafter.) Resentment is an anger one harbors against the perpetrator who caused injury or harm, a conscious disposition with clear cause and goal for impending action in mind. Ressentiment is not such a disposition at all. It is not a motive, a cause, or a goal of an action. It is a group consciousness, as it were, that the individuals are not aware of as having but that which explains the group's formation. It is almost like a physiological cause of the symptoms that identify the group as such in its genealogy of development. It cannot be a historical explanation that takes into account motives, intentions, and causes that the contemporary or later generation can identify. Ressentiment is hidden to the historical actors or groups. It can only be discovered by what Ricoeur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion." (It appears that only Nietzsche can discover it, and no one else can, like the notion of differance that only Derrida can discover in the texts of other philosophers, just as only Heidegger can discover Being of beings as truth in the history of metaphysics. The list goes on starting from Plato or even prior to him, from the pre-Socratics.) Ressentiment, which is always repressed and of which one is unconscious, is a creative power of will to dominate. It is another form of the will to power. Like subconsciousness, it is hidden but, as a will to power, it is subversive with the cunning power of intelligence. It is vengeful without (being conscious of) vengeance. It converts weakness, the low status, and oppression of the (Christian) slaves into virtues, thus creating a religion and morality out of them, the morality of the herd instinct that dominates the west in the end. The slave class become the master class imposing their own morality. Ressentiment, in short, is the will to power dominating the western culture, religion, and morality. The conquest of the slave class is carried out not by strength (which they lack) but by cunning intelligence which makes up for the physical weakness and the low social and political status. Yes, the slaves, the weak, the lowly have "this will to power of precisely the weakest!" (96, 56, 91, 68, 106, 111, 119, 120). The will to power, then, is not only for the Übermensch, who wills trans-evaluation of all values, but also for the slave class who employs it entirely differently in order to survive and eventually to dominate. Ressentiment positively contributes toward formation of the present, dominant culture of the west. Like a psychoanalyst who deciphers the manifest symptoms on surface to discover the hidden root-causes, a genealogist digs into the present morality or religion in order to discover the hidden, repressed, and ignoble origin: ressentiment. Genealogy is not a history that recalls the past based on documentary evidence, because ressentiment is neither motive or a conscious cause of the slaves' morality. It is not empirical either. It cannot be recalled as a forgotten memory or group consciousness. Like births and deaths in the family genealogy, ressentiment is the pre-condition of the slave morality that lies beyond good and evil, beyond consciousness and memory, beyond freedom and will. By hermeneutics of suspicion one (Nietzsche) deciphers the root cause of the symptoms left as trace on the surface of current and accepted mores and culture. The task of Übermensch, the trans-evaluation of all values, is possible because there is no truth. Nothing is real; there is no absolute value. Everything is (subject to) interpretation. "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable," a title to one of the chapters in Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, indicates not only Nietzsche's strategy of inverting Plato (who is said to hate artists (really?) for creating fables and imitations of nature twice removed from the real; The Republic, 394d; 398; 595a, b; 596b, e; 597b, d, e; 605c; 606d; 607) but also his fundamental assumption that the world itself is nothing but a fable. What if reality itself was a creation of an artist (you or the Christian slaves, not God)? What if there was nothing to imitate? What if the image the artist creates on the canvas were the real? What if life itself was an art, something to be created with imagination and re-created after having abolished all values? If life is but a fable, we have entered into a world of evil genius, where everything is a lie, a lie perpetrated as truth behind which there is nothing but laughter of the evil genius in the game of disingenuousness and cheat played without ever being caught or without the possibility of ever being caught. As Daniel W. Smith put it: The true world is no longer opposed to the false world of simulacra; rather, truth now becomes an affirmation of the simulacrum itself, falsity affirmed and raised to a higher power" ("Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism," Continental Philosophy Review, Spring 2006, p. 17). In such a world, there is no cause, no progress, no teleology but only random occurrences of signs whose meanings are to be interpreted, re-interpreted, or created in terms of system of signs and semblances: But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a 'thing,' an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The 'development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost,--instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures (55). History is a random series of interpretations where the later generation dominate, subjugate, and replace the prior generation in the system of signs that does not relate to anything prior or aim at any particular goal. The sequence of interpretation and re-interpretation is random and accidental without having any cause or justification but done only out of pure will to dominate and to replace. Given such a world, the job of philosophers is "to solve the problem of values and ... to decide on the hierarchy of values (37). Once the hierarchy of values is determined, one can then scramble it or destroy it with a hammer or polemic so as to trans-evaluate all values. A philosopher must take on the role of the Übermensche and engage in the trans-evaluation of all values and exercise endless interpretation and re-interpretation, thereby abolishing all former values by overpowering and dominating:... anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it;... everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consists of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former 'meaning' [Sinn] and 'purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated" (55). Language too does not reflect or mirror reality but only gives signs to be interpreted as meaningful only in terms of other signs: "'What signposts does linguistics, especially the study of etymology, give to the history of the evolution of moral concepts?'" (37). What do signs do? They refer to other signs, like dictionary. There is nothing real behind the sign; there is no ultimate reality that is signified. To coin it in terms of modern linguistics, there is no signified behind the signifier. A world in which there is nothing behind the sign would be a world of fable in which one lives by creating one's own values, not based on values that are pre-ordained and assigned to oneself. If life is a fable, history too is a fable created by the dominant mores of the time. Nietzsche thus celebrates the aesthetic life, an exuberant life of artist, in contrast to Plato, who wanted to banish poets from the city (Republic 398) for creating fictional worlds. Nietzsche ends the chapter referenced above from Twilight of the Idols as follows: "'The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps?... But no! We got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!" Platonic inversion and banishment of the dichotomy between truth and illusion, between intelligibility and sensibility, between appearance and reality will have been accomplished. The cave man has return from the world of the real that are shining brightly in the light of day outside the cave back to the depth of the cave, where all he sees is nothing but silhouettes of artifacts and people milling about in the city, projected by the deem light from the fire burning behind him inside the dark cave (Republic, Book VII, 514a-520a). He is back to the world of semblance and illusion, the place of theatre and reality shows--Donald Trump's world, perhaps--where there is nothing behind the image, because image is everything. There is no reality behind the appearance. The 'true world' is nothing but simulacra and artifacts. But, as Nietzsche claims, by banishing the 'true world,' the world of illusions too is banished. A new dawn awaits to arise. What kind of world will it be? Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to tell us. After publishing On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887, he became mad two years later in January 1889--but not without finishing 6 more books he had been working on--and died in 1890 at age 56. A truly productive life. [To be continued in "Comments" below.]

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-16 00:00:00 Rodwyn Dimaranan Not so much a single argument as a braid of related thoughts, this is a brilliant, confused little book. The aphorisms, moment by moment, are capable of being enormously generative; reading this after a full summer of Foucault was especially fun. As a whole ... well, I can't help but read it as a theology, laugh at the many very funny jokes, and scratch my head at the methodological and argumentative gaps. I'll give the man this, though. If we were all allowed to write like him, we'd have a less exact world, but quite possibly a better one.