All in all , Nietzsche's aristocratic posture of naivety needs to be understood as the redeeming factor of his work. Those who turn to his work in order to know facts, as such, about human nature, will surely end up being disappointed -- that is, if they are capable of having the kind of integrity and intellectual rigour that will allow them to think things through. Nietzsche's work aims for deeper truths than those about some kind of static "human nature". If you are looking for these, you will surely find reasons to bolster various dogmatic positions, but you will be left empty.
Nietzschean naivety, however, takes things lightly, and is not dogmatic. Whilst I am on the subject -- patriarchal ideology, if you have swallowed it, is anything but naive and has all sorts of hidden agendas. One of its major ones is for males to cast off bad feelings by projecting them onto and into women. This is the opposite of aristocratic self-transcendence of bad sensations or self-mastery. It's conniving.
2 comments:
Hmm...I like your blatant attack on patriarchy at the least opportunity you get. I personally don't think it's necessary at all. Is patriarchy still a problem in the West?
I'm reading two novels by Robert Walser that would probably interest you. He was Swiss and had a very interesting take on subordination and rebellion. He understood the need for a man to always assert his authority in no matter how small or unimportant a venue. But of course for him, as a man, that meant that he had to subordinate himself to more powerful men, such as his schoolmaster, higher ranking military officers, and his boss, making himself a non-man in his own eyes. He eventually decided that he didn't care, that it was all a farce. He understood the game quite well but chose not to play it. He saw how people would want to use him, and he declined to be used.
As a Swiss citizen he was always going to be taken care of in spite of his non-compliance, and he ended up in a Swiss asylum and lived to a good age.
There is a fine review by Coetzee of his books online in the New York Review of books. I think what Coetzee says would also be of interest to you. I don't know about the translations, which I suspect aren't very good.
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