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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Klossowski on Nietzsche: Combat against culture#2 « Previous | |Next »
September 18, 2004

As we have seen in the earlier discussion of the first chapter of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle entitled 'The Combat against Culture' Klossowski has argued that Nietzsche had put culture into question.

He now goes on to argue that culture implies slavery in the sense that it is the product of slavery. This both looks back to classical Greek culture and to Hegel's master slave dialectic. Klossowski picks up on Hegel as mediated by Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Kossowski says:


"Culture is the product of the Slave; and 'having produced culture, he is now its conscious Master---this is what Hegel demonstrated. Nietzsche is the incorrigible beneficiary of this culture. But for Nietzschethe salcve who has become the master of culture is nothing other than ---Christian morality."

Klossowski then goes on to say that Nietzsche attacks Hegel's dialectic at its roots:

"In his analysis of the unhappy consciousness Hegel distorts the 'initial Desire (the will to power): the autonomous consciousness (of the Master)despairs of ever having its autonomy recognized by another autonomous being; since it is necessarily constituted by a dependent consciousness ---that of the Slave. In Nietzsche, there is no need for this reciprocity...on the contrary, given his own idiosyncracy--the sovereingty of the incommunicable emotion ---the very idea of a 'consciousness for itself mediated by another consciousness' remains foreign to Nietzsche."

I remain with Hegel on this. Mediation is the pathway out of individualism and the pathway to becoming.French culture makes the shift to becoming but it has a tendency to remain within ensconced individualism.

Personally I think that Klossowski exaggerates the way Nietzsche broke from Hegel's dialectic. He reworks it more than breaks away since the historical account of morality in his The Genealogy of Morals is very dialectical and works within the historical conception of culture mapped out in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Moreover Nietzsche's metaphsyics of a world of forces in The Will to Power is a dialectical process account.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:46 PM | | Comments (0)
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