I would like to redescribe Lou Salome's thesis that Nietzsche's philosophy can be seen as a reflection of his psychology and his philosophical development as driven by a series of illnesses and recoveries.
Nietzsche as a materialist in that the root of culture is the human body. In The Gay Science he says that philosophy is connected to the interpretations of the impulses, needs and drives of the body and he criticises the philosophical tradition for its blindness to the body. We are human animals.
His diagnosis of what makes us sick is Christianity as an instinctual structure of the human animal. This tempering, subjection and organizing of the body's
powers is what has broken down in modernity. This is a catastrophe but it opens up new possibilities for a different way to organize the body's powers that can affirm life rather than deny it. We have possibilities to become healthy and joyous animals rather than the sick and miserable animals we were in a Christian culture.
Of course, the 'we' who shape these possibilities are the fearless ones, the free spirits, those sovereign individuals who are capable of acting as commanders and legislators----as spelt out in Bk 5 of The Gay Science (paragraph 343 ff).
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 13, 2003 08:38 PM | TrackBackthe body, as animal, is as unrecognized as is christianities emphasis on anti-essential necessities. you make your observation that it has broken modernity down in a way that sterilizes other factors of modernity down to that influence only-ie the essence of social change and complexity. Would it be more effecatious to emphasize Neitzsche's processes of making the body more of a factor?
What, if any, are the bodies abilities to make societal distinctions-it is as if it almost acts as a bacteria in a way. Essentials are always distinct from a type of 'social instinct' as I see it.
Dave,
The body is meant in the sense of a self-interpreting animal. That kind of embodied existence is a shift away from from seeing human beings primarily----their identity---as a consciousness(eg.,John Locke)
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on September 14, 2003 10:00 AM