Dionysus Mirror
Dionysus’ Mirror: Valerie Nguyen Reflections on Becoming “Truths” Wed. 3-4 – Phil. 184 and “the World” as Becoming Edoardo Zavarella
In The Will to Power, an expansive and stylistically convoluted accumulation of Nietzsche’s private reflections, we encounter the following train of thought, symbolically embedded within a passage that is virtually in the eye of the tempestuous text: “The character of the world in a state of becoming as incapable of formulation, as ‘false’, as ‘self-contradictory’. Knowledge and becoming exclude one another”(517).
As soon as this …show more content…
Reading his words, we recognize all the elements, the letters, concepts, as it is a language in which we are fluent, and yet its contradictoriness forces us into a particular tropological topography where we have never ventured that is both familiar and foreign. They appear as unnatural blooms on barren grounds of a logic whose composition normally precludes such anomalies from arising within its conditions. Such, however, is the ‘green thumb’ and the life-conferring laugh of the ‘Übermensch’, the paradoxical “parodistic attitude … towards all former values as a consequence of [Zarathustra’s] abundance”(617), who has transcended the determinism of our dialectical climate while still inhabiting it in his wealth of contradictions. It is in these rare moments where we approach the ‘senseless’ in its own terms that we come to realize how certain schemas—the greatest among them being language—delimit our “world”. An experience of Dionysian individuation allows us to fathom the perspectival character of knowledge, and thus a dissolution of the self: “When one has grasped that the "subject" is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much …show more content…
From this asymmetrical preservation of values, arises the most endangering form of despairing nihilism wherein man desperately clings to non-being, as a valueless relic of “an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign”(604), out of a subconscious fear of contradiction, even though it necessarily results in their own annihilation. Nihilism ends up becoming the ultimate sacrifice for the law of non-contradiction: “the belief in … aim- and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable … one interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as there if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain”(55). It is for this reason that “not being able to contradict is proof of an incapacity, not of "truth"(515). Conserving this dead language, man can only speak in devalued, hollow words or in negations. In a world view where becoming is unintelligible, and the categories of “being” and “non-being”, or non-existence, form a mutually exclusive exhaustive ontology under which may be subsumed all existing entities, the
In The Will to Power, an expansive and stylistically convoluted accumulation of Nietzsche’s private reflections, we encounter the following train of thought, symbolically embedded within a passage that is virtually in the eye of the tempestuous text: “The character of the world in a state of becoming as incapable of formulation, as ‘false’, as ‘self-contradictory’. Knowledge and becoming exclude one another”(517).
As soon as this …show more content…
Reading his words, we recognize all the elements, the letters, concepts, as it is a language in which we are fluent, and yet its contradictoriness forces us into a particular tropological topography where we have never ventured that is both familiar and foreign. They appear as unnatural blooms on barren grounds of a logic whose composition normally precludes such anomalies from arising within its conditions. Such, however, is the ‘green thumb’ and the life-conferring laugh of the ‘Übermensch’, the paradoxical “parodistic attitude … towards all former values as a consequence of [Zarathustra’s] abundance”(617), who has transcended the determinism of our dialectical climate while still inhabiting it in his wealth of contradictions. It is in these rare moments where we approach the ‘senseless’ in its own terms that we come to realize how certain schemas—the greatest among them being language—delimit our “world”. An experience of Dionysian individuation allows us to fathom the perspectival character of knowledge, and thus a dissolution of the self: “When one has grasped that the "subject" is not something that creates effects, but only a fiction, much …show more content…
From this asymmetrical preservation of values, arises the most endangering form of despairing nihilism wherein man desperately clings to non-being, as a valueless relic of “an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign”(604), out of a subconscious fear of contradiction, even though it necessarily results in their own annihilation. Nihilism ends up becoming the ultimate sacrifice for the law of non-contradiction: “the belief in … aim- and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable … one interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as there if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain”(55). It is for this reason that “not being able to contradict is proof of an incapacity, not of "truth"(515). Conserving this dead language, man can only speak in devalued, hollow words or in negations. In a world view where becoming is unintelligible, and the categories of “being” and “non-being”, or non-existence, form a mutually exclusive exhaustive ontology under which may be subsumed all existing entities, the