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September 15, 2004
Chapter One of Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is called 'The Combat against Culture.' It opens with some questions:
"Is the 'philosopher' still possible today....What does a philosophical existence mean for us today? Isn't it always a way of withdrawing? A kind of evasion?...What then does the behaviour of the philosopher amount to? Is he a mere spectator of events, at once lucid and impotent."
Klossowski answers these in relation to Nietzsche. He says that Nietzsche rejected the attitude of the philosopher-teacher:
"He made fun of himself for not being a philosopher---if by that we mean a thinker who thinks and teaches out of a concern for the human condition...What Nietzsche meant to say through his own rejection of the system was that if philosophy merely concerns itself with a transmission of 'problems', it will never get beyond the general interpretation of a particular social state of its own 'culture'".
Many would consider the school of analytic philosophy to be a living example of that.
Niezsche's alternative conception was to combat culture from the perspective of its relation to life and to what is sick and healthy. This leads to an agonistic conception that identifies who is the adversary or enemy to be destroyed. This was the culture of liberal capitalism and it involved deploying the Stoic techniques of self mastery to free onself from the sickness of this culture.
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