The Heart Laid Bare
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXV. Nietzsche - part 14
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
p 62
[In the early 1950s] ... he [Foucault] returned to the Hopital Sainte-Anne, one of the biggest and most modern psychiatric facilities in France [where he had been confined during his suicidal phase], this time to do research... “I had a very strange status there,” Foucault later recalled. “Nobody worried about what I should be doing; I was free to do anything. I was actually in a position between the staff and the patients.” The ambiguity of his position, one imagines, was also heightened by his own recent brushes with madness. “I had been mad enough to study reason,” he later quipped: “I was reasonable enough to study madness...” “I felt very close to and not very different from the inmates...”
For the moment I’m going to ignore the Waiting For Godot stuff on page 65.
Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare
p 67
...In the preface he published to Madness and Civilization in 1961, Foucault summarized his projected lifework in terms that suggest the profundity of Nietzsche’s impact on him in these formative years. His goal, he declared elliptically, would be “to confront the dialectics of history with the unchanging structure of the tragic.” This would require a multifaceted “inquiry,” into madness of course, but also, in future books, into dreams and into “sexual prohibitions” and “the happy world of desire.” But he would conduct all of these inquiries, he stressed, “sous le soleil de la grande recherche nietzscheene” -- under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest.
A cryptic phrase, an enigmatic epiphany. For what did Foucault mean by “the great Nietzschean quest”? And why did Nietzsche, and specifically the Nietzsche of the Untimely Meditations, suddenly speak to him so powerfully... in 1953?
... The four essays collected in the Untimely Meditations were composed between 1873 and 1876, after the frosty reception accorded to Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy. [It appears I was set-up by Mr. Miller. The previous section reminded me of that book because he was leading up to it in his own book. I’m going to let him repeat some of what I’ve already said.] In this work, originally published in 1872... [Nietzsche] had propounded a bold new theory of tragedy. “The unchanging structure of the tragic,” according to Nietzsche, pitted two timeless drives against each other: the Apollonian [Miller prefers this spelling to "Apollinian and so does my spellchecker] propensity to shape the world with forms of just and pleasing proportions; and the Dionysian tendency to shatter such forms and violently transgress the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason... [the book was not received well in Nietzsche’s academic circles] “It is the free man’s task to live for himself, without regard for others,” he wrote in one of his notebooks from this period...
p68
The essays in the Untimely Meditations all express in various ways Nietzsche’s effort to find his own purpose, his own “higher necessity.” The Untimely Meditations, he later explained, offer “a vision of my future,... my innermost history, my becoming.” Above all, it was the essay that he called “Schopenhauer as Educator” that illuminated the inner logic of what became Nietzsche’s own lifelong quest -- to understand, as the famous subtitle of Ecce Homo puts it, “how one becomes what one is.”
Now I’m a little nervous about commenting on something Miller may be getting ready to cover himself, but... The weakest parts of The Birth of Tragedy, the parts Nietzsche most regretted fifteen years later, were the parts that were most influenced by Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's philosophy essentially played the role for Nietzsche that Marxism was playing for Foucault -- burdening him with ready ideas that were not his own and were, in fact, at variance with his own ideas. Also, Schopenhauer is almost as deadening to read as Heidegger, though it’s slightly easier to parse his meaning.
The first sentences of “Schopenhauer as Educator” lay out Nietzsche’s central theme with compact eloquence: “A traveler who had visited many countries and people and several continents, was asked what trait he had discovered to be common to all men, and replied: a tendency to laziness. Some will think that he might have answered more accurately and truthfully: They are all afraid. They hide behind custom and opinions. Basically, every man knows quite well that, being unique, he is on this earth only once, and that no accident, however unusual, could ever again combine this wonderful diversity into the unity he is. He knows this, but hides it like a bad conscience. ”
p69
...Throughout most of his life, Nietzsche, like Foucault, rejected the idea that the self is something merely given. In the eyes of both men, “truth,” including the “truth” about one’s self, “is not something there, that might be found or discovered -- but something that must be created. ” “Our body is but a social structure. ” as Nietzsche once put it -- and our self is but the contingent and changing product of a shifting deployment of cultural and corporeal forces.
...A creature of history, every human being embodies a compound of nature and culture, chaos and order, instinct and reason -- two heterogeneous dimensions of being human symbolized, as Nietzsche saw it, by Dionysus and Apollo.
p70
...To tap the primal essence of our animal nature was, for Nietzsche, to grasp anew the mysterious capacity of “transcendence,” and to exercise what he called the “will to power. ”
...Born and raised in a tradition, a human being at first may experience its cultural inheritance as a cozy haven of custom and habit. But each person’s cozy routines turn out, on closer inspection, to be a singularly haphazard concatenation of “fragment and riddle and dreadful accident, ” hidden beneath a comforting veneer of “borrowed manners and received opinion. ” Sorting through the manners and opinions, and the desires and appetites, that any culture implants in every soul -- and trying to imagine transforming them -- is, in effect, the challenge every truly creative human being must resolve.
“Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone, ” Nietzsche - writes in “Schopenhauer as Educator”. “True, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods that would like to carry you across the river, but only at the price of your self, you would pledge your self, and lose it. In this world there is one unique path which no one but you may walk. Where does it lead? Do not ask, take it. ”
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