Gottfried & Blicero, Nietzsche & Pynchon

[jbor]

I'm not sure that either Nietzsche or Zarathustra, let alone Pynchon, are
actually in the business of setting up a new table of values at all, though
I agree with much else that you write on the subject. Within every system of
morality is a subjective pov, they seem to be saying; any system of good and
evil, any moral judgement, is simply the justification for a particular set
of ethical prejudices. It is the idealism of all such teleologically-
grounded systems (Platonism, Christianity, democracy, the drive to
self-preservation) which is actually life-denying, because there are always
aspects of life and living which are denied, left out of the equation (i.e.
made preterite). Such systems feast upon weakness and guilt, foster
world-weariness (ressentiment), and poison human vitality and the creative
spirit. Thus the perspectival multiplicity of their texts, which does not
render the negation of meaning but, conversely, is an enhancement of
possibilities (both/and, not either/or).

I think that the fundamental problem presented by the radical relativism
(i.e. the nihilistic ramifications) of Nietzsche's thinking perseveres
throughout his work. He shrugs off Schopenhauerian pessimism early on (as
with shallow Wagnerian flag-waving), and seems to want to affirm life and
living, to discover a way beyond the inevitable nihilism pursuant to the
collapse or abandonment of values and belief systems he foresaw (i.e. "God
is dead", the demise of metaphysics, the scientific renunciation of absolute
knowledge). I don't know how successful he was in achieving this, and it is
this part of his philosophy (the Ubermensch, the "will to power", the
"splendorous blonde Beast", art and the creative transformation of social
relations, a "higher" morality et. al.) which is seized upon by anti-Semites
and fascists in decades hence and travestied to serve their heinous -- and
utopianist -- visions of world domination.

For Nietzsche the "will to power" has no origin and no purpose, no beginning
or end, for these are idealist, metaphysical categories themselves. The
creation of new values he speaks of are to be "faithful to the earth" (see
esp. *The Gay Science* sections 108-9, 125, 343), a process of "translating
man back into nature" (that notion of immanence again). "The soul is only a
word for something about the body ... " says Zarathustra. 'Crazy' talking in
*The Will to Power* Nietzsche exhorts: "*This world is the will to power --
and nothing besides!* And you yourselves are also this will to power -- and
nothing besides!" (Sect. 1067)

best


----------
>From: MichaelB <mjoking at yahoo.com>
>
snip
> Who
> amongst us has the Stength to create values where our fellow men are
> concerned?  To say yes, to say no: to claim for yourself (and for
> humanity, though not in the sense of a categorical imperative) what
> is good and bad.

and before

> In answering the question of Pynchon's being beyond good and evil,
> you say he doesn't see himself as an ubermensch. --But I don't think
> that an ubermensch, in Nietzsche's sense, is one that is merely
> beyond good and evil.  One must certainly be beyond good and evil,
> but that awareness is the necessary groundwork for what the
> ubermensch primarily does: revaluates old tables of values, or
> better, revaluates existing tables of values.  To be merely beyond
> good and evil but to fail to create new values in the nothingness
> that resides 'beyond good and evil' is to further that aspect of
> modernity that the ubermensch overcomes--nihilism.  I obviously am
> none too swift in my knowledge of Pynchon, but I would guess that in
> this sense--in recognizing the nothingness that permeates
> 'reality'--he is certainly beyond good and evil.  The question would
> be, then, does Pynchon create, and continue to create, ever new
> tables of values.  Has Pynchon overcome the nothingness?  I for one,
> am unabashed about admitting I have not yet been able to grasp that
> most crucial overcoming, that essential creating.