I.D. Greeks 00002
SRINIFUJI:

May I ask if you have any opinion on Nietzsche with regard to woman in this context here?

GARY C MOORE:

It is very interesting and important that you have mentioned Nietzsche and women in the context of Aristotle and women because they both relate to understanding what the real premises of a philosopher are and that those premises, even if inconvient and not scholarly fashionable, are still their basic premises. Nietzsche makes it explicit in his writings that he writes philosophy deliberately in an ironic fashion and deliberately seems to contradict himself. He has no interest in explaining “The Truth” to you at all, but of provoking you into your own thinking. Of course, “Truth” is many sided to him if it even exists at all outside his absolutely private and personal experience. So when he makes his ‘statements’ about women, one should definitely STILL NOT regard them as simple statements of truth-value of the simple-minded sort as two oranges plus two oranges are four oranges. Many readers seem to accept the ‘irony’ up to the point where he says things that can hurt one’s feelings, for instance, about Jews or women. Now, it has been abundantly and thoroughly adequately demonstrated he was not and never was anti-Semitic. Most people have accepted that. But Nietzsche wants to attack people who think of themselves as groups, and he certainly attacks the tyrannical and bigoted priestliness of the Old Testament Jews with no holds bared, and deliberately relates them to people who think like them in his day - including anti-Semites!! (Troeletsch?) So when he says, “Truth is a woman,” he certainly is saying that truth is wilely, secretive, beguiling, and deceitful like a woman is suppose to be.

But what people somehow blunderingly manage to ignore is that he is saying this about “Truth”!!!! THEREFORE it would seem to logically follow that ANY truth-value statement, including the statement “Truth is a woman” is put in extreme question, a extreme question like “All Cretans are liars,” as the Cretan philosopher said. The point is, you have to find out for yourself in each and every individual case in all thinking, in all living, that there are NO safe generalizations and classifications of people, that there is no such existing ‘thing’ as sociology or psychology or history or political structures or institutions, but only your individual situations where you deal with other individual people and that that is all the ‘reality’ any institution consists of.

This is inconvenient to the point of destroying ‘social’ efficiency through and through. They cannot live together. But this ‘They’ consists of you dealing with specific people manipulating ‘social’ power for their own convenience, comfort, and ends. You can never oppose “society” because there is no such ‘thing’. This indeed stretches Nietzsche’s thinking but I think is justified by it and he would agree—but only “ironically” because agreement in truth-value has the same problems as Sartre made explicit in being ‘sincere’. One person makes a statement another person hears. That person then judges that statement according to the private history of his or her own understanding. In essence, then—in reality—there can be no such thing as a ‘public’ truth-value statement. The same words may be heard, but no two people will, or even can, hear them as meaning the same thing though, at first, they may seem to share a similar context. But as time passes, even in a few seconds, different connections are formed in one’s own mind that have nothing to do with what is going on in your neighbor’s mind. This is obvious. This is plain common sense. But I can say those statements because they are essentially negative and a denial of positive truth-value.

Now, with the lenses of this ‘viewpoint’ Nietzsche made, one must look at Aristotle. What are his basic premises? Seeing how things actually are, exist, and work. He is interested in truth-value never in a truly absolute and universal binding sense on all people against their will, but is interested in how people in such-and-such situations and accepting certain presuppositions of their own in a very variously interpreted common agreement, must operate to achieve the supposedly agreed upon common goal. This state JUST applies to people who want to establish a state. There are other beings that do not, do not want to, and cannot fit into this scheme of things at all. “APPENDIX 1” below describes some of those beings.

The point is, when Sara Rappe refers to “the ideal state” in Aristotle, this is in NO sense like Plato’s Republic ‘seriously’. He is establishing a state according to his notion of “the golden mean” which is an image of balance, of justice not according to any absolute set of rules, but of compromise, of finding a meeting point of mutual agreement between two disputing parties. This is the way it is in the POLITICS and this is the way it is in the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS. You do not deal with or even consider the ideal and perfect but the situation as it is and stands and is stable. It is a compromise, a balancing of clear and present dangers. At least here, it is not a search for the “Good”. The education of young children he describes, though he has recommendations, is essentially the tried and true traditional. He does not want to fix what is not broken. He knows disturbing things that are working very relatively well often leads to disaster through unforeseen circumstances. So he never radically attacks the status quo. But, as I show in the “APPENDIX 1”, there are individuals, and purely individual situations, that can ‘rise’ above that.

The situation as it is, is necessarily the situation one must understand and deal with FIRST, before you create the fairy-tale land of “Things as they should be.” Aristotle does not deal with fantasylands. He can show you “This is how politics works” and “This is the most reasonable way a political system can work, considering from where it starts out.” But those are always with things as they already specifically are. So it is in this context that his statements about women must be taken. The situation is purely relative from beginning to end. He is making statements about the ‘nature’ of woman within very limited contexts of necessity. They are not absolute statements as I showed in the distinction between total self-sufficiency in the POLITICS as being ‘bestial’ and total self-sufficiency in the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS as being the highest ideal and most truly divine (as also in the first book of the METAPHYSICS).

APPENDIX 1 (from the end of the 3rd part of the letter “EMPSUXA”):

This is an open-ended text with open-ended thinking; maybe something some of you are not use to. It is not saying a human is absolutely this scientifically observed object or an animal is that scientifically studied subject. It is explaining that homo sapiens sapiens is fully an animal with one ability, conversance, logos, that other animals do not specifically have. But that some animals do have the entire fundamental experiential basis, which is the ground for human conversance, so that the dividing line between, logon and alogon is extremely ambiguous. I think Heidegger makes it crystal clear that this is what Aristotle is saying, that the animal may not have the full ability of conversance, but that it does have all the preliminary abilities, that make full conversance possible in human being possible, which means an animal does seem to be logon, and not alogon at the same time, to a limited extent. This is a possible trade-off of added ability in conversance for human being opposed to being a deficiency compared to the wordlessly unbounded experience of the animal is made clear in an even more ambiguous text, THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. McNeil & Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 237-8 [German 346].

“We cannot explain escaping and pursuing simply by applying theoretical mathematics or mechanics, however complex. Here a quite primordial kind of movement reveals itself. The escaping worm does not merely appear within the context of a sequence of movements, which began with the mole. Rather the worm is escaping from the later. This is not simply an event, but rather the escaping worm behaves as fleeing in a particular way with respect to the mole. And mole for its part behaves with respect to the worm by pursuing it. Thus we will describe seeing, hearing, and so forth, and also assimilation and reproduction, as a form of behavior, as a form of behavior, as a form of self-like behavior [Sichbenehmen]. A stone cannot behave in this way. Yet the human being can he or she can behave well or behave badly! But our behavior in this proper sense can only be described in this way because it is a comportment, because the specific manner of being which belongs to man is quite different and involves not behavior but comporting oneself toward . . . The specific manner in which the animal is we shall call behavior. They are fundamentally different from one another. In principle it is also possible to reverse this linguistic usage and refer to animal comportment. The reason why we prefer the first way of describing the matter will be revealed from the substantive interpretation itself. Being capable of . . . means being capable of behavior. Capability is instinctual, a driving forward and maintaining oneself in being driven toward that which the capacity is capable of, toward a possible form of behavior, driveness toward a performance of a p! Particular kind in each case. The behavior of the animal is! Not a doing and acting as in human comportment, but a driven performing [Treiben]. In saying this we mean to suggest that an instinctual driveness, as it were, characterizes all animal performance. Yet here again, from a purely linguistic point of view, we can see that the terminology is arbitrary if we recall that we also talk about driving snow where there is no question of anything organic announcing its specific manner of being. This shows that language in all this is not subject to logic, and that a certain inconsequentiality belongs rather to the essence of language and its meanings. In other words, language is something that belongs to the essence of man in his finitude. To imagine a god expressing himself in speech is utterly meaningless.”

Heidegger deliberately puts in question his own language and definitions as he goes along until he comes to this ultimate point that the terminology is arbitrary which “shows that language in all this is not subject to logic and that a certain inconsequentiality belongs rather to the essence of language and its meanings. In other words, language is something that belongs to the essence of man in his finitude. To imagine a god expressing himself in speech is utterly meaningless.” Language is specifically stated as belonging to the essence of man in his finitude and we are brought immediately back to the point of comparison I raised long ago to Aristotle’s POLITICS, that he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity (Bk I, 2, 1253a3-4), and he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god (1253a27-8). YET this “self-sufficiency” is held by Aristotle in the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS, X, 7, is held to be a condition of the highest excellence; and that this will be the best thing in us (1177a11-1177b1), i. e., to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself divine or only the most divine element within us, this activity is contemplative which is most continuous, where philosophy is thought to offer pleasures marvelous for their purity and their enduringness, where the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to contemplative activity. For while a wise man, as well as a just man and the rest, needs the necessities of life . . . but the wise man, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he! has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-sufficient.”

APPENDIX 2 (from an addition to “The Ideology of Carnival,’ part 3):

Quote 4b. continued . . . The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. It is the incarnation of this world as the absolute lower stratum, as the swallowing up and generating principle, as the bodily grave and bosom, as a field which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to sprout. ¶ Such are the rough outlines of this concept of the body. In Rabelais’ novel this concept has been most fully and masterfully expressed . . . (pp. 19-27)

The last sentence cannot be emphasized too much. Bakhtin is making Rabelais’ novel as quite simply the greatest of all philosophical expressions. This may seem outrageous. You may consider it bluntly wrong through and through. But what I am trying to show now is this is what Bakhtin believes, that his AND Rabelais’ endeavors are philosophical and neither ‘literary’ nor ‘literary criticism in their trivial senses. This is, in part, why I am interspersing Heidegger’s texts. Heidegger’s recreation of Nietzsche and Bakhtin’s recreation of Rabelais share a mutual incomprehension in academia, i. e., in academic seriousness. BEING SERIOUS – “Merely amusing, meaningless, and harmless laughter was also tolerated, but the serious had to remain serious, that is, dull and monotonous,” Bakhtin, RABELAIS, pg. 51 – “[Zarathustra] knows that the greatest and smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel organs, the later always accompanying its true proclamation,” Heidegger, NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. Krell, Harper Collins, 1984, pg. 60 -- distorts and wrecks what both philosophers are trying to say. Bakhtin says, “Thus, in the system of grotesque imagery death and renewal are inseparable in life as a whole, and life as a whole can inspire fear least of all,” RABELAIS, pg. 50. Heidegger says, “ . . . being as a whole can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation,” NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, pg. 62.