Saturday, September 24, 2005
(2:55 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Sheerest Idiocy
I'm sure there's some remark in some tattered old notebook of Nietzsche's where he says: "To be capable of the sheerest idiocy--in this we free, very free spirits have recognized the greatest strength of the true philosopher" -- and then Walter Kaufmann would drop a footnote saying, "Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 234":Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook: the gruesome thoughtlessness to which the feeding of the family and of the master of the house is abandoned! Woman does not understand what food means--and wants to be cook. If woman were a thinking creature, she, as cook for millennia, would surely have had to discover the greatest physiological facts, and she would have had to gain possession of the art of healing. Bad cooks--and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen--have delayed human development longest and impaired it most: nor have things improved much even today. A lecture for finishing-school girls.The assignment for this week's class is Beyond God and Evil, chapters 5 and 9 -- when I first saw that on the syllabus, I wondered why. Reading chapters 6 and 7, however, I see the inner necessity of that assignment -- no need to fritter away class time on what amounts to two rather questionable rants.
