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March 28, 2005
As we have seen in an earlier post Pierre Klossowski's chapter 4 ('The origin of the Four Critieria') of his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle explores Nietzsche's philosophy of rank and order, and the need to ensure the formation of the higher types to under-take the revaluation of values. This is the concern of Bk 4 of the Will to Power, which is entitled 'The Strong and the Weak.' It is here that Nietzsche defends the new, yet-to-exist higher type as over-man, (as a noble man and aristocrat) who is both a master of the earth and a philosopher who is a legislator of the future.
Part 11 of Bk 4 of The Will to Power is entitled 'Dionysus', and Klossowski refers to para. 1009 (which is not online). This particular paragraph is concerned with the point of view of Nietzsche's values as he engages in the process of the revaluation of all values. On this Nietzsche says:
"1007 (Spring-Fall 1887)
To revalue values--what would that mean? All the spontaneous--new, future, stronger--movements must be there; but they still appear under false names and valuations and have not yet become conscious of themselves.
A courageous becoming--conscious and affirmation of what has been achieved--a liberation from the slovenly routine of old valuations that dishonor us in the best and strongest things we have achieved."
Para 1009 personally spells out Nietzsche's claim in the next paragrpah that the revaluation of values is only achieved when there is a tension of new needs, of mean with new needs, who suffer from the old values.
As we seen in Chapter 4 Klossowski addresses the issue of evaluation and what is valuable from the perspective of the categories of healthy/strong and morbidity/weak. He links Nietzsche's questioning of Western culture as an aspect of the way he interrogated himself. Klossowski continually links Nietrsche's interrogation of his experiences to the Sils-Maria experience of the eternal return, and he understands this in terms of the conflict between the unconscious chaotic Dionysian forces and consciousness, language and the conventional signs of everyday life.
Klossowski then jumps back to, and gives a very close reading of, para. 47 in Bk 1, Euopean Nihilism, in The Will To Power to spell out the sickness health mode of evaluation deployed by Nietzsche to revalue all values. In this section Nietzsche is discussing decadence as a necessary consequence of life:
"The concept of decadence.--Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it."
It is not decadence that is the problem: it is sickness or the contagion of the healthy parts of the organism. In para 47 Nietzsche says:
"What is inherited is not the sickness but sickliness: the lack of strength to resist the danger of infections, etc., the broken resistance; morally speaking, resignation and meekness in face of the enemy.
I have asked myself if all the supreme values of previous philosophy, morality, and religion could not be compared to the values of the weakened, the mentally ill, and neurasthenics: in a milder form, they represent the same ills....
...Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities that fight over the living organism and turn it into their arena."
Klossowski asks: is Nietzsche saying that the good of the agent is measured in terms of its resistance to harmful invasions and so affrms the strength of its will and so he is in accord with traditonal morality; or is saying that traditional morality is a weakness. What then are these harmful invasions? The impluses? Is not the will to power the supreme impluse. How, then, could it be harmful to Nietzsche.
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