Re-reading Nietzsche's GAY SCIENCE, I'm much more aware of his blindspots -- the most significant one being that he supplies no dialectic, no conceptual linking, between various expressions of power and the psychological outcomes of these. I guess this is his Germanic Idealism (which he never left behind): everything takes place on a plane above the material world. Characters spontaneously appear and form on the basis of manifesations of the Unconscious mind, or of instincts emerging, but actually (although he does not observe this) engendered through history (via the medium of culture).
It's a naive perspective. Is it okay to be so naive as a philosopher and writer? He understands psychology only within the narrow confines of what constitutes culture. This is like understanding reality in two dimensions, when it actually takes place in six.
His understanding that witches and heretics were evil because they considered themselves evil is an extreme example of Nietzsche's psychological superficiality, not because the point he makes is psychologically incorrect on a very basic level, but because others considered them evil first. How is Nietzsche's way of thinking any different from the criticism that he levels at Kant, namely that the capacity to think in a certain way is engendered by "a faculty"?
Nietzschean "engendering" however would appear to come from gender.
Let us restate Nietzsche's original opinion to make his conceptual framework a bit clearer:
"Evil springs from 'a faculty' -- known as the feminine gender. This faculty in turn created witches and caused them to try to destroy everything that was good and proper."
Ah, now.
It's a naive perspective. Is it okay to be so naive as a philosopher and writer? He understands psychology only within the narrow confines of what constitutes culture. This is like understanding reality in two dimensions, when it actually takes place in six.
His understanding that witches and heretics were evil because they considered themselves evil is an extreme example of Nietzsche's psychological superficiality, not because the point he makes is psychologically incorrect on a very basic level, but because others considered them evil first. How is Nietzsche's way of thinking any different from the criticism that he levels at Kant, namely that the capacity to think in a certain way is engendered by "a faculty"?
Nietzschean "engendering" however would appear to come from gender.
Let us restate Nietzsche's original opinion to make his conceptual framework a bit clearer:
"Evil springs from 'a faculty' -- known as the feminine gender. This faculty in turn created witches and caused them to try to destroy everything that was good and proper."
Ah, now.
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