MDMD(7) Ruggiero & Nietzsche (WAS Re: MDMD(7) Ruggiero)

[Doug Millison]

Nietzsche mentions Boscovich in "Beyond Good and Evil", On the Prejudices
of Philosophers, section 12. Interesting that the science of a Jesuit
brother leads to this dismissal of "soul atomism....the belief which
regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, in divisible, as a
monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!"
Something more to chew on as I continue to ponder Pynchon's treatment of
soul, spirit, afterlife, etc. in M&D.

Here's the passage from Beyond Good and Evil that mentions Boscovich (on
the Web at http://www.cwu.edu/~millerj/nietzsche/bge1.html):

"As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there
are, and in Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so
unscholarly as to attach serious significance to it for convenient
household use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression) thanks
chiefly to the Dalmatian Boscovich and the Pole Corpernicus have been the
greatest and most successful opponents of visual evidence so far. For while
Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that
the earth does not stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief
in the last part of the earth that "stood fast" - the belief in substance,"
in "matter," in the earth-residuum and particle-atom; it is the greatest
triumph over the senses that has been gained on earth so far.

"One must, however, go still further. and also declare war, relentless war
unto death, against the
"atomistic need" which still leads a dangerous afterlife in places where no
one suspects it, just like the more celebrated "metaphysical need": one
must also, first of all, give the finishing stroke to that other and more
calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul
atomism. Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief
which regards the soul as something indestructible. eternal, in divisible,
as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science!
Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of "the soul" at
the same time, and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable
hypotheses - as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly
touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for
new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions
as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and ''soul as
social structure of the drives and affects want henceforth to have
citizens' rights in science. When the new psychologist puts an end to the
superstitions which have so far flourished with almost tropical luxuriance
around the idea of the soul, he practically exiles himself into a new
desert and a new suspicion - it is possible that the older psychologists
had a merrier
and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that
precisely thereby he also concerns himself to invention - and - who knows?
- perhaps to discovery."

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