Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-dualism

Notes

Notes 1. INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHE AND EMBODIMENT 1. See Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur’s Nietzsche: Life as/and Literature (1993) and Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985). 2. Herman Siemens describes the importance of the notion of fiction for Nietzsche in terms of the “open horizon” it provides and its “performative aspect .” “The distance between teleology and fiction is measured by the difference between enclosing the horizon of the future, and playing with an open horizon” (Siemens 2001, 81). What Siemens calls “agonal transvaluation”—a dynamic of “‘saying and unsaying’ (Blondel),” empowering and disempowering—is fostered by a strategy of fiction’s performativity: “Nietzsche’s philosophical discourse at the surface of the text is but part of a larger organization or economy of energy, grounded in embodied, affective engagement” (2001, 82). 3. See n. 6, chapter 2. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile: or On Education (1762/1979, 361) says that nature positions woman as child bearer and caretaker. 5. Moira Gatens’s concept of body in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, Corporeality suggests such a contradiction. 6. Here, with some hesitation, I compare the Buddhist idea of “emptiness.” Nietzsche’s description of a modern experience and concept of “nihilism”—of no proper self, of no God, of suffering the apparent meaninglessness of suffering—is like that of “Great Doubt” (Nishitani 1982, 18–19). Paralleling the transition in certain Buddhist traditions from “Great Doubt” to the experience of “absolute emptiness” is the Nietzschean transition from nihilism to Ja-sagen [Yes-saying] 181 (Nishitani 1982, 66, 124). “On the field of emptiness, all things appear again as substances . . . though of course not in the same sense that each possessed on the field of reason” (124). Because having passed through the field of nihility, the “selfness of the thing as it is on its own home-ground . . . cannot be expressed simply in terms of its ‘being one thing or another’” (124). That is to say, it cannot be expressed according to ordinary language of reason. This concept and experience of absolute emptiness Nishitani also calls the “Great Affirmation, where we can say Yes to all things” (124). How far to take this parallel remains a question for another project. For now let us note that Sumio Takeda (2000–2001, 105) and Keiji Nishitani (1982, 66, 124) conclude that the concept of emptiness surpasses that of Nietzsche’s Jasagen both with respect to the absoluteness of its nihilism and its affirmation of being. Neither, however, considers Nietzsche’s view of the human tendency to self-deceive, which would make Nietzsche wary of any absolute ontology. This, together with Nietzsche’s view of “great health” not as a settled ontology or possession but “a struggle, a process” (Glenn 2001, 110), that one “’acquires continually , and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up’” (GS 382, qtd. in Glenn 2001, 110), leave open for further inquiry the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and that of certain Buddhist traditions . For further discussion see Steven Laycock (1994) and Carl Olson (2000). 7. Judith Simmer-Brown (2001a). 8. The language “as metaphor and through metaphor” comes from Eric Blondel (1991, 205). 9. See, for instance, Tim Murphy (2001). 10. By phenomenological approach I mean variations of a method first described by Husserl and generally involving a suspension of one’s judgment about correct ways to characterize being or beings. One substitutes for judgment observations about the way being or beings appear for human being. 11. See n. 4, chapter 7. 12. See n. 5, chapter 7. 13. See n. 2, chapter 7. 14. Merleau-Ponty’s primary resource for case studies was research by neurologist Kurt Goldstein, who examined and wrote extensively about the behavior of men injured in World War I. Goldstein’s major work, The Organism, was first published in German in 1934 and appeared in English in 1939. 15. The term “make up” is from Elaine Scarry (1985). 16. Nietzsche’s characterization of “Socratism” arises in his writings as early as The Birth of Tragedy (1967). 17. I borrow this phrase from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996). 18. See Scott (1990, 19). 182 Notes to Chapter 1 19. See Robb (1986, 317). 20. Fiona Hughes attributes to Nietzsche the necessity “of a particular life” of an individual. “In experimenting...