I've decided to have another go at reading Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. I find it a difficult text and I did not really understand a lot of it on my last attempt. That was reading chapter 3. However, I have no idea what Klossowski is trying to do in deriving Nietzsche's philosophy from his lived experience of mental illness. This pathway puzzles me.

Chapter 4, 'The origin of the Four Critieria', addresses the issue of evaluation and what is valuable from the perspective of the categories of healthy and morbidity. Klossowski connects this understanding of valuation to the symptoms of vigor and decadence, of strength and degeneration in the social world and in himself. He then connects vigor, healthy and powerful to gregarious, successful type, exchangeable, comprehensible, communication and languages, whilst decadence, morbid and weakness is linked to singular, degenerate type, unexchangeable, muteness and non-language.

Okay. I can accept that. Nietzsche refers to ascending and descending types of life in Bk. 4 (para 857) of The Will to Power, in the section entitled 'Doctrine of the Order of Rank.'

We are continually walking the non-human/human divide and the sick/ healthy divide within the world of nihilism and the revaluing of values. Only a certain kind of person can undertake the revaluation of values--the Over-man: the powerful master type who rules the weak, the masses, slaves and sickly types.

What determines order and rank is the will to power whilst my rank is determined by my quantam of power. And so the concern is doing away withe slavish mentality of meekness, moderation chastity etc.--what could be called the Christian virtues.

Klossowski asks a couple of questions. These are:

How can the attributes of power, health and sovereignty be restored to the singular, to the unexchangeable to mutness?

And another: are things that are healthy and necessarily powerful a product of gregariousness as language seems to require?

And another: what, in lived experience refers to the singular and what, in the way that it is lived, belongs to the order of gregariousness?

Okay the questions don't mean all that much to me. But I can go along with them to see where the responses lead. Klossowski's pathway seems to be that Nietzsche's questioning of Western culture was merely an aspect of the way he interrogated himself. He quotes paragraph 909 from Bk. 4 of The Will to Power. Book Four is entitled 'Discpline and breeding' and paragraph 909 is within a section entitled the 'The Strong and the Weak.' Para. 909 says:

"909 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

The typical forms of self-formation. Or: the eight principal questions.

1. Whether one wants to be more multifarious or simpler?
2. Whether one wants to become happier or more indifferent to happiness and unhappiness?
3. Whether one wants to become more contented with oneself or more exacting and inexorable?
4. Whether one wants to become softer, more yielding, more human, or more "inhuman"?
5. Whether one wants to become more prudent or more ruthless?
6. Whether one wants to reach a goal or to avoid all goals (as, e.g., the philosopher does who smells a boundary, a nook, a prison, a stupidity in every goal)?
7. Whether one wants to become more respected or more feared? Or more despised?
8. Whether one wants to become tyrant or seducer or shepherd or herd animal?"

He is pointing to something new: the new barbarian as a species of the conquering and ruling type. The lower is to provide the base for the higher sovereign types who can endure.

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