Trevor a passage from your Nietzsche and Klossowski post jarrred. My response to the jarring is a desire to open things up; to probe for what causes my unease.

You were talking about the difference between Nietzsche's early and late aesthetic periods and observed:

"While he was under the influence of Schopenhauer.... [Nietzsche] believed that 'the highest and ultimate things find their answer not through reason but through inspiration and illuminations in the life of the will'. It was the development of a critical attitude to Schopenhauer's metaphysics that led to Nietzsche abandoning a philosophy of the will. When he rejected the metaphysics of reason -I hope I'm not being too crude - he didn't return to the idea of will but reached deeper, into the instincts, some would say, into the soul itself."

I accept 'Nietzsche under the influence of Schopenhauer' bit. It is very clear in the essay Schopenhauer as Educator' in Untimely Meditations. The rejection of will is clear in the Twilight of the Idols where he says:

"Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and will-o'-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either--it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!"(para 3, The Four Great Errors)

However, I'm not convinced by the 'French existential' reading re the will, reason and instincts. Or rather more uneasy than unconvinced. I concur with Klossowski's judgement that Nietzsche shakes modern philosophy to its very roots and is a very radical critic of Western culture. And, I would add, is a critic of the mechanism of the natural and physical sciences. Nietzsche sees the world through the eyes of an artist philosopher.

Let me try and put my unease down. I have two concerns.

First, the embrace of instinct. As I understand it, the early Nietzsche of the Birth of Tragedy distinquished between the Appollinian and Dionysian tendences and identified them with Socratic reason and science (rationalism)+serene sense of proportion (the beautiful?) and what can be called a disruptive unsettling, displacing, transforming tendency: a flood of passion that breaks through all restraint and convention.

Greek tragedy best expressed the "terror and horror of existence". The argument argument of Birth of Tragedy was that life is awful, but art makes it endurable and Greek tragedy was the pinnacle of art. Then Socrates and scientific reason introduced a new, and for Nietzsche destructive, element into the equation which brought the reign of Dionysus to an end. Thus the end of tragedy.

Nietzsche's own assessement of Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo can be found here.

The conception of the Dionysian tendency as raw passion was latter modified to a controlled passion; control as in a dance. That is not instinct. It is an artistic shaping.

My other comment has to do with the reaching down into instinct or the soul itself. I would redescribe this as body in line with my interpretation of Nietzsche as the philosopher of the body. It is a redescription not a rejection.

In the The Will to Power (Bk.111, para 492) he says that the body and physiology is the starting point, his perspectivism is embodied, with the entire apparatus of knowledge directed at taking possession of things. (para 503) We impose upon the chaos of life as much regularity and form as our practical needs require. (para 515).

This suggests to me the Darwinian idea of human beings being in the world as dogs do. (Well, Darwin re-interpreted through Hegel's relational organic metaphysics of becoming). Dogs are very much in their bodies: theirs is a bodily existence. Ours are too with proviso that our bodies are socially shaped and formed.

What this means is that consciousness is not the cause of our actions. For Nietzsche (Part One para 3) our conscious thinking and feelings are guided and channelled by our instincts or embodied desires.

My unease? It's the soul stuff. It suggests a mystical language: eg., 'tonality of the soul;' 'intensities of lived experience that can neither be taught or learned'; 'beyond knowledge and outside communication' etc. Maybe this is the impact of Bataille---eg. the ecstasy and agony of the experience of intense passion? But, as it stand it suggests a muteness to me.

I'm not rejecting the French existentialist interpretation as somhow incorrect in favour of say Heidegger's metapahysical one which is correct. Rather, my unease indicates a puzzlement. I fear that the existentialist interpretation seems to connect madness, mysticism and philosophy in a way that gives rise to disquiet about muteness. This metaphysical and poetic upward valuation of the incommunicable strikes me as dangerous.

Can you unpack, open up, the French Existentialist interpretation more? What are they getting at and what are they trying to do with the mystical bit that causes my unease?

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