From: snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 18:11:56 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Nietzsche and Crypto Anarchy (fwd)
Message-ID: <199704210036.TAA00289@smoke.suba.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I forwarded Mr. May's post to a buddy of mine, Ronald Carrier, who is 
getting his Piled Higher and Deeper in Continental Philosophy. I asked 
for comments, and recieved permission to forward his comments to the 
list. Here it is:

Forwarded message:
> From rcarrier@suba.com  Sat Apr 19 18:02:57 1997
> From: "Ronald M. Carrier" <rcarrier@suba.com>
> Good afternoon.
> Thanks for forwarding this to me.  I've taken a look at it, and it seems 
> to me to be a good introductory indication of what Nietzsche was up to.  
> There are just three points on which I'd like to offer a bit of 
> clarification.
> 
> (1) Nietzsche as "anti-systematic" thinker: this is something that is 
> also referred to when Nietzsche is called a "perspectival" thinker.  
> Nietzsche thinks that thinking was an activity that is ultimately in the 
> service of life, where "life" is a process of discovering and developing 
> one's capacities for acting to the fullest.  (And on this understanding 
> of life, thinking would itself be one of these capacities for acting.)  
> For Nietzsche, to develop a system is to develop a perspective, and so to 
> develop a certain way of living.  Indeed, he regards systems primarily as 
> _symptoms_ of various ways of living.
> 
> What he dislikes about systems is that they are perspectives that are, so 
> to speak, monopolistic--they are ways of thinking (and, in the end, ways 
> of living) to which everyone must submit themselves and which deny that 
> there are other ways of thinking and living that may be better suited for 
> someone.  Nietzsche is anti-system in that he thinks that life is best 
> served if one is able to develop in oneself the capacity for multiple 
> perspectives, multiple ways of thinking and living.  Nietzsche himself 
> attempts to do this in his own writing--hence the aphoristic style of 
> which he was fond.  (This is not to say that Nietzsche was not capable of 
> developing a sustained argument--_On_the_Genealogy_of_Morals_ does 
> precisely this.)
> 
> For Nietzsche, thinking best serves life and is symptomatic of life at 
> its best (i.e. a life that is active and deals creatively with the 
> circumstances that chance throws up for it, rather than one that is 
> reactive and tries to minimize the role of chance and change in living) 
> if it is the interplay of as many different perspectives as one can handle.
> 
> (2) Nietzsche and evolution: I think it's good that the author pointed 
> out the connections that can be made between Nietzsche and contemporary 
> evolutionary biology.  Nietzsche did not think much of Darwin, but this 
> is not so much because he disagreed with what Darwin wrote (I'm not sure 
> whether he had read Darwin himself or not) as because he disagreed with 
> what others tended to make of what Darwin wrote (or what they supposed he 
> wrote).  Nietzsche disagrees, not with Darwin's notion of natural 
> selection, but with the popular notion of evolution (a notion which 
> Darwin did not himself employ in his works).
> 
> "Evolution" presupposes that what organisms there are and what they are 
> like is something that is predetermined and that inexorably unfolds 
> across time.  Natural selection, even in Darwin, is incompatible with 
> evolution in this sense because natural selection posits chance and 
> change as both ineliminable and necessary to the process of speciation.  
> And as I pointed out above, Nietzsche thinks that chance and change are 
> ineliminable from life and necessary for the development of life at its 
> best.  "Evolution" also involves the idea that there is some one best way 
> of life that is the unavoidable outcome of evolution, namely whatever way 
> of being human that the "evolutionary" thinker thinks is best.  This is 
> for Nietzsche a reactive way of thinking.
> 
> But while Nietzsche's way of thinking is compatible with contemporary 
> evolutionary biology, I think it's misleading to claim that his 
> understanding of life is "biological."  Nietzsche thinks that biology 
> plays an ineliminable and necessary part in life, but he also thinks that 
> life is more than just a matter of biology.  (Nietzsche was suspicious of 
> science because he thought that it too aspired to be a system in the 
> sense of a monopolistic perspective.  In other words, he disliked scientism.)
> 
> (3) Authoritarian v. libertarian: The author claims that these are 
> contradictory positions in Nietzsche.  I don't think they are.  They 
> would be contradictory if Nietzsche held that everybody was equally 
> capable of attaining to life at its best.  Nietzsche is _very_ clear in 
> his denial of this.  He thinks that reactive thinking and living is 
> typical of the great mass of people and suitable for them.  They are able 
> to live as well as they do precisely because a confinement to one 
> perspective suits them--expose them to the possibility that their 
> perspective is not suitable for all, and they will fall into despair 
> (because from their perspective the way of life they lead must be 
> suitable either for all or for none).
> 
> Only a very few are, in Nietzsche's view, capable of thinking and living 
> actively.  Insofar as the ideal political arrangement would be one that 
> would discover and cultivate these active few and put them in positions 
> where they could do their best, while letting everybody else get along 
> more or less as their reactive lives permit, it would be libertarian for 
> the best and authoritarian for the rest.  To the extent that 
> libertarianism presupposes equality of nature, Nietzsche is not a 
> libertarian; to the extent that authoritarianism is based on a reactive 
> way of life to which both master and slave are beholden, Nietzsche is not 
> an authoritarian.  His politics are, if anything, those of Aristotle in 
> the _Politics_.  (This is not terribly surprising--Nietzsche was a 
> philologist by training and so had a wide familiarity with ancient Greek 
> writings.)
> 
> HTH.
> 
> Later...
> 
> --
>                    Ronald M. Carrier -- rcarrier@suba.com
>                Graduate Student in Philosophy, Northwestern U.
>                   "Philosophy--I'm only in it for the money."