Pre-release Rocky IV trailer from 1985 VHS tape
Du Musst Amboss Oder Hammer Sein --
"You Must be Anvil or Hammer."
Nietzsche insists that we should “give the finishing stroke” to what he calls “the soul atomism”, which he goes on to explain as :
"....the belief which regards The Soul as Something Indestructible, Eternal, Indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon:
This Idea Must be Driven out of Science."
John The Dragon is a Machine, Driven by Ideology, Chemicals and Lightning, not A Man --
He oes not regard himself as Human.
He is not a Human Being. He is not An Individual.
He is Not a Person -- He is not The Mask which The Spirit Speaks Through and Echoes Forth from
being A Man, he is A Soldier, fighting on the Front Line of A War
Whatever He Hits --
He Destroys.
Hammer into Anvil
Number Six is incensed when he witnesses the suicide of Number Seventy-Three who has been brutally interrogated by Number two and he informs Number Two that he will avenge her death.
(Thunder)
(Six) Where am I?
(Two) In the village.
(Six) What do you want?
(Two) Information.
(Six) Whose side are you on?
(Two) That would be telling.
(Two) We want information...
(Two) Information...
(Two) Information.
(Six) You won't get it.
(Two) By hook or by crook...
. . .we will.
(Six) Who are you?
(Two) The new Number Two.
(Six) Who is Number One?
(Two) You are Number Six.
(Six) I am not a number.
I am a free man!
(Number Two laughs)
(Bell)
TWO :
Why did youslash your wrists, 73?
Aren't you happy here?
You're not being very cooperative.
73 :
There's nothing I can tell you.
TWO :
Come, now, you must know where your husband is.
He's still there.
TWO :
Where?
Oh, somewhere there.
He had some work to finish.
TWO :
Was he devoted to you?
He is devoted to me.
TWO :
Oh.
You don't mind about him
and the woman, Mariah?
That's a lie!
TWO :
Stop protecting your husband.
He went to her hotel several times.
Then there was the villa, of course.
Let me show you just how loyal your dear husband is to you.
They look quite at home together.
Would you like to know the date, the place?
Look -- I've wasted enough time.
(Woman screams)
(Screaming)
(Screams)
TWO :
You shouldn't have interfered.
You'll pay for this.
SIX :
No...
You will.
(Telephone bleeps)
TWO :
This is Number Two.
I want you in My House.
We've got nothing to talk about.
TWO :
You defied my instructions to come here.
We have things to discuss.
About the girl you murdered?
TWO :
No. I want to talk about you.
You're wasting your time.
Many have tried.
TWO :
Amateurs.
You're A Professional.
A Professional Sadist?
TWO :
Light blue.
Fearless - or are you?
Each man has his breaking point.
You are no exception.
Ah, you react!
Are you afraid of me?
What is going on up there?
SIX :
Disgust.
TWO :
You think you're Strong.
We'll see.
Du musst Amboss oder Hammer sein.
"You must be Anvil or Hammer."
I see you know your Goethe.
And you see me as the anvil?
Precisely. I'm going to hammer you.
(Bleeping)
Number Two.
Yes, sir,
everything's under control.
No, sir, no problems.
Assistance? No, sir, I can manage.
No, sir, of course. Be seeing you.
You were saying
something about a hammer?
Get out.
Thank you very much.
I'll break you, Number Six.
Yes.
Get me the supervisor.
Supervisor? Number Two.
Alert all posts.
Special surveillance on Number Six.
Report any unusual activity to me.
" Nietzsche’s actual psychological explanations rely heavily on appeals to sub-personal psychological attitudes. As Janaway (2009: 52) observes, a great many different kinds of attitude enter these accounts (including not only the standard beliefs and desires of current-day moral psychology, but also “wills”, feelings, sensations, moods, imaginings, memories, valuations, convictions, and more), but arguably the core attitudes that do the most work for him are drives and affects. These attitude types have been intensively studied in recent work (see esp. Richardson 1996 and Katsafanas 2011b, 2013, 2016; see also Anderson 2012a, Clark and Dudrick 2015).
While much remains controversial, it is helpful to think of drives as dispositions toward general patterns of activity; they aim at activity of the relevant sort (e.g., an eating drive, a drive for power), and they also represent some more specific object or occasion of the activity in a particular case (e.g., this ice cream, or overcoming a particular problem in the course of writing a paper). Affects are emotional states that combine a receptive and felt responsiveness to the world with a tendency toward a distinctive pattern of reaction—states like love, hate, anger, fear, joy, etc. Typically, the sub-personal attitudes postulated in Nietzsche’s psychological explanations represent the world in one way or another. Since he endorses Leibniz’s thought that representation, not consciousness, is the decisive mark of the mental (GS 354), it is reasonable to treat these attitudes as distinctively psychological, whether they are conscious or not.
But what about a personal-level self to serve as the owner of such attitudes? It seems that Nietzsche’s postulated drives and affects could not coherently be counted as psychological (and sub-personal) without such a self, and yet, the skeptical passages canvassed above seem to rule out any such thing.
This remains a controversial problem, but it is clear at least that Nietzsche’s own proposal was to develop a radically reformed conception of the psyche, rather than to reject the self, or soul, altogether.
BGE 12 provides some provocative ideas about what such a reformed conception might involve: there, Nietzsche insists that we should “give the finishing stroke” to what he calls “the soul atomism”, which he goes on to explain as
"....the belief which regards The Soul as Something Indestructible, Eternal, Indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: This Idea must be driven out of Science."
"Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “The Soul” at the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses—as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on “the soul” without immediately losing it.
But the way is now open for new versions and refinements of the soul hypothesis, [including] “mortal soul”, “soul as subjective multiplicity”, and “soul as social structure of the drives and affects”… (BGE 12)
Here Nietzsche alludes to traditional rational psychology, and its basic inference from the pure unity of consciousness to the simplicity of the soul, and thence to its indivisibility, indestructibility, and immortality. As he notes, these moves treat the soul as an indivisible (hence incorruptible) atom, or monad. Nietzsche’s alternative proposal takes its shape from the rejection of such atomism—the soul as he understands it will be internally complex, rather than simple, and therefore subject to disintegration. That idea informs Nietzsche’s striking slogans about the soul’s “mortality”, “multiplicity”, and internal “social structure”. The “drives and affects” are evidently supposed to serve as the constituents comprising this multiplicity. Nietzsche thus construes the psyche, or self, as an emergent structure arising from such sub-personal constituents (when those stand in the appropriate relations), thereby reversing the traditional account, which treats sub-personal attitudes as mere modes, or ways of being, proper to a preexisting unitary mental substance—(see Anderson 2012a for an attempt to flesh out the picture; see also Gemes 2001; Hales and Welshon 2000: 157–82). But however vulnerable, mortal, and subject to inner division the soul is supposed to be on the reformed conception, it nevertheless remains (as Nietzsche’s rejection of reductive naturalism makes clear) a genuinely psychological entity over and above its constituent drives and affects. Moreover, since the drives and affects that constitute it are individuated largely in terms of what (and how) they represent, the psychology needed to investigate the soul must be an interpretive, and not merely and strictly a causal, form of inquiry (see Pippin 2010).
In these respects, Nietzsche’s psychology treats the self as something that has to be achieved or constructed, rather than as something fundamentally given as part of the basic metaphysical equipment with which a person enters the world. This idea of the self as achieved rather than given was noticed already by Schacht (1983), and was elevated into a central theme in Nehamas’s (1985) influential Nietzsche interpretation. On that reading, the project of individual self-fashioning, or self-creation, is located at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical agenda (see esp. GS 290, 335; TI IX, 49). Highlighting Nietzsche’s commitments to the values of artistry and individuality, the interpretation claims that the main goal of Nietzsche’s new philosophers would be to construct novel, interesting, and culturally resonant individual lives, whose overall shape they could affirm (despite whatever setbacks they involve) on the strength of the (broadly) aesthetic value they instantiate. In Nehamas’s version, this agenda was centrally bound up with Nietzsche’s project as a writer; he is supposed to have created himself, in the relevant sense, as an authorial persona through writing such distinctive books (Nehamas 1985; see esp. 233–4). While this suggestion, and even the very idea of self-creation, has remained controversial both textually and philosophically (see, e.g., Pippin 2010: 109–11), it has led to much further work—some directly influenced by Nehamas (1985), some developed in partial or entire opposition to it—yielding real insights about the nature of Nietzschean selfhood, and the relations among the key ideas of self-creation, the creation of value, individuality, and Nietzschean freedom (see, e.g., Gerhardt 1992; Nehamas 1998: 128–56; Leiter 1998; May 1999: 107–26; Anderson and Landy 2001; Reginster 2003; Anderson 2005, 2009, 2012a; Ridley 2007a,b; Gardner 2009; Gemes 2009a; Pippin 2009, 2010; Poellner 2009; Richardson 2009; Acampora 2013; Katsafanas 2016: 164–96, 220–56; Anderson and Cristy, forthcoming).
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