“One drop of blood too much or too little in the brain can make our life unspeakably wretched and hard…But the worst is when one does not even know that this drop of blood is the cause. But ‘the Devil’! Or ‘sin’!” - F. Nietzsche, Daybreak.
This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
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ReplyDeleteChristopher,
ReplyDeleteWhat are we to make of this quotation out of context? The only thing that I make of it is that it is meaningless to cite the Devil as the cause of our problems, just as it is meaningless to say the God created the universe. In both cases, the assertion would more honestly be replaced with, "We don't know the cause of our problems" and "We don't know how the universe came to be (if it did not always exists)." As for "sin," Nietzsche may mean that it is just an empty label we apply to actions (our own or others') that make our lives wretched. In any case, if the quotation has profundity, then I've missed it.
In exegetical terms, this is one of the passages that Leiter cites in his scholarly papers (and references now and then on his blog) in arguing against one prominent interpretation of Nietzsche. The prominent interpretation at issue is called "aestheticism" sometimes and "perspectivism" at other times. The idea is that Nietzsche regarded the world as if it were a work of art, open to contending but not mutually exclusive interpretations.
DeleteLeiter is arguing on the contrary that Nietzsche is a naturalist. He believes by understanding the world as matter in motion one understands it rightly, and by trying to give any spiritual construction to it one fails to understands it at all. There is nothing so neutral here as perspectivism suggests. Naturalism is simply right. The above quote is one of the texts Leiter cites for this point.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3008749