Tuesday 29 October 2013

The Nietzschean issue of consciousness

Bataille takes up Nietzschean issues as to how language and consciousness have a tendency to limit experience so that it remains within a modality of slavishness.

Consciousness might well be a pathology, suggests Nietzsche.  It curtails instinctive modes of being.  Language itself facilitates a trend to ignobility, because it was developed to communicate needs on a tribal level, Nietzsche says.   In effect, that which emphasizes the needs of the group does not readily lend itself to individualism.   Rather, language has a whirlpool effect, pulling individualism toward mass agreement and conformity.   Even whilst the creative individual struggles to escape, language has this centripetal effect.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity