Tuesday, January 13, 2004
(11:21 PM) | Anonymous:
The Will to Power and Kant
I hate to break up the very interesting theory discussion but I have made promises and promises must be kept. I miss having the opportunity to write on here as much but this quarter has been harder in the first week than any of my previous school years and, unfortunately, school, for some reason, must come first. Regardless, the nature of the academic life is that you fill up and fill up and never quite have the time to excrete those thoughts that have compacted in the brain and the time must come for one to do so or risk blowing up; though I must point out that I have no real scientific knowledge, which is of course the only True knowledge, to make such a statement.
Those of us interested in philosophy and even those of us interested in science all know about Kant's project. The basic idea is that, because of Hume, the certainty we once gave to our sense perception was flawed. Human experience and reason was not going to find the First Cause and as such everything we do is in question. Hume recognized that we can't live this way and very obviously we do sit down in chairs without much thought but what he had effectively done was disengender all meaning in human action. Kant was awoken from his dogmatic slumber by this revelation and began his project to see if there was anyway that we could engender meaning again, reunite the human condition. Kant went on to assert that all knowledge must be based on a priori cognition, such as what we often times find in mathematics. Of course the kind of outlook that Kant creates is one that gives primacy to science, the scientific method and enlightenment values of moderation in all things except knowledge ("Think what you will, but obey!"). In reality, the kind of meaning Kant was looking for would not change anything or have any real materialist effect on the human condition; an effect of his assumption concerning mind/body. This looks much like our current brand of neo-Conservatism that has become the common ideology of American youth, though I'm not trying to blame Kant for that but I think it is evident that it leads to nothing but self-propagation (We will bring democracy to the world so they won't kill us anymore!).
Nietzsche's project started out with a similar problem, how can meaning be given back to a life that was and is still becoming nihilistic? The way he goes about it is entirely different; instead of looking to science Nietzsche, for better or worse, looks to the ancient Greeks and their tragedies. Of course the Greeks had a great respect for science and most of what we do in our own sciences is somehow indebted to the Greeks but this did not give them meaning, it did not establish a love of life! When earthquakes and wars destroy your cities and science, for all its greatness, is unable to save you then there is no relying on it for the good life. So they taught themselves that this was the way of the world, a move of infinite resignation (I know Kierkegaard again, sue me!) and then they lived on. Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, of woe and blessing, was the chaos of the world and Apollo ordered it through art. Eventually Nietzsche comes to see both these aspects brought together in the god Dionysus but the path is still the same. Have wisdom to see that the world is not kind, that the order of the world is not here for humanity, that ultimately it is chaotic and the amor fati (love of fate) to accept that while never forgetting that the will to power can engender that suffering with more beauty than science could ever hope to give.
