Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Teaching Day (Nietzsche)

"On Truth and the Lie" -- The interminable traffic between the literal and figural -- and the promise of vitality and threat of deception inhering in each in the exclusion of the other. The Gay Science as prelude to Ecco Homo: Behold the man! Text as person, person as text, interpretation as life. Amor Fati as embracing the contingency of life, affirming its vicissitudes, philosophy not as finding a way to stand above the fray so much as finding a way to be stylish in the storm. Ressentiment as the Nietzschean fetish -- facts are fetishes forgetful of their figuration. The revaluation of values as an ironic inversion of the ultimate ironist Socrates (also Nietzsche as Socrates, Socrates as Dionysus, Christ as Dionysus, Dionysus as Anti-Christ, Nietzsche as Anti-Christ, Nietzsche's last line: "Have I Been Understood? Dionysus Versus the Crucified," versus as abutment against, contestation over, collaborator with...): Socrates proposes a mimesis to bridge the chasm of is from ought -- contradiction in dialectic averts us from errors of fact, contradiction in conscience averts us from errors of value, Nietzsche proposes a funhouse mirror in which dynamism and hence contradiction prevails both ontologically and normatively, eternal recurrence is "the open sea" that confronts us with a radical refigurability of experience, responsibility to which demands in turn its affirmation as yielding the moment one would will again and again (as if a demon demanded it -- from the Gay Science) and to which one is equal by an exhibition of virtuosic style (the "one thing that is needful" -- from the Gay Science).

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