A GLIMPSE Of NIETZSCHE BY: Richard j.Kosciejew

A GLIMPSE OF NIETZSCHE





At the outset, our acquaintance with Nietzsche will progress to its given frame reference and find to the occasion of a noticeable state from which we are going to confront the diverse representations under which therein we will engage upon our characterological residue that lodges within the issues of our uncertainties and the probable possibilities that surround the age in which we live. There is a particular aptness to set forth a causative succession with Nietzsche. He died in 1900, and ever since people have seen something meaningful in that event and date. For Nietzsche laid down a challenge to the modern age that we are still wrestling with, and as we can, contribute by means of explicating upon the emphasis drawn of the twentieth century for which a great uncertainty assimilates of our own traditions. Nietzsche, more than anyone else, is the eloquent spokesperson for the creation of that self-conscious and discerning of situations.

By way of introducing Beyond Good and Evil, and other writings of Nietzsche and contributing others, it will be to point out, as if by conquest, a few salient points that appoint Nietzsche as the great critic of that tradition and then meaningfully suggest to why this critique is potentially so powerful and yet disturbing.

Although enwrapped in shrouds his guise to overshadow that which we can identify Nietzsche in a decisive challenge to the past, from one point of view there should be nothing too remarkably new about what Nietzsche is doing, least of mention, his style of doing so is very intriguing yet distinctively. For him, undertaking to characterized methods of analysis and criticism, under which we should feel quite familiar with, just as the extracted forms of familiarity are basic throughout which contextual matters of representation have previously been faced. He is encouraging as a new possibility for our lives a program that has strong and obvious roots in certain forms of Romanticism. Thus, is to illustrate how Nietzsche, the greater burden of tradition, as he is himself deeply connected to categorical priorities as to finding the considerations of which make of tradition.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia (1844-1900), and the son of a Lutheran minister who died insane four years later. Nietzsche spent the years of childhood with his mother, sister, grandmother, and two aunts. In 1858 he entered boarding school, and in spite of poor health went on to study Theology and classical philology at the university of Bonn, and then once removed to Leipzig, he became influenced by Kant, Schopenhauer, and the composer Richard Wagner. A year in the army in 1868 was cut short by illness, but his elitist intellect distinctively was as such that in 1869 he was appointed to the chair in philology at Basel, although at the opportunity he was only twenty-four years old, and had none of the formal qualifications usually required. Leipzig happily gave him his doctorate without obtaining any examination or thesis. Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie dus dem Geiste der Musik (1872, translated to English as, The Birth of Tragedy) introduces the famous distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian spirit in Greek life and thought. The work is among other things, a challenge to the Buddhist resignation of Schopenhauer, as far as creating the Apoollionian response of Dionysius is something positive, active, and heroic than apathetic and passive. Nietzsche’s next writings were written from 1873 to 1876, are the four “Untimely Meditations” (Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen): As signalling Nietzsche’s break with the composer Richard Wagner, partly because of the latter’s nationalism and anti-Semitism, partly because of what Nietzsche saw as the fogging Christianity of the opera Parsi fal, and because Wagner was not supportive of Nietzsche’s own flirtation with the French Enlightenment. In 1879, Nietzsche renounced his chair from the university because of his chronic health, and on a modest pension devoted the rest of his minutes to writing. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878-80, translates as, Human, All too Human), were the first of the aphoristic books, followed by Vermischte Meinungen und Srüche (1879, translates as, Mixed Opinions and Aphorisms) and, Der Wanderer und sein Shatten (1880, translates as, The Wanderer and His Shadow), Morgenröte, Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile (1881, translated as, The Dawn: Reflections on Moral Prejudices) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882, translated as, The Gay Science) this begins his crucial exploration of self-mastery, the associated correlation between reason and power, and the revelation of the conscious striving and unduly persuasions that give influence of abiding considerations of power, if only to that provide the actual energy for the apparent self-denial in the forbearing continuousness as the set-worth itemization for the martyr

It was during this intermittent interval that Nietzsche’s failed relationship with Lou Salomé resulted in the emotional crisis, however that from which Also Spake Zarathustra, (1883-5, and translates as, Thus Spoke Zarathustra) signals a recovery for Nietzsche. We have frequently regarded this work as Nietzsche’s masterpiece, and were to follow by Jesuits von Gut und Böse (1887, translated as, Beyond Good and Evil), and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, translated as, The Genealogy of Morals), and other minor works. We have commonly accepted that during the years toward his death (and after it), his sister and guardian or nurse Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche, played a role in muddling the channels of Nietzsche’s influence on German life.

Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility to knowledge: ‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for truth, or believe or imagine, just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species and even what is here called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day’ (The Gay Science)

His position is very radical. Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation he the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter,

Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that the being not sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and of which interpretation would correspond if that were to unite knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial interpretation in The Will to Power: Fact and precisely what there is not, only interpretations.

It is often claim that perspectivism is undermining. If the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is agued, at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, then, it follows again that not every view is an interpretation.

However, this refutation assumes that if a view can interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that not every view is an interpretation. Nevertheless, this refutation assumes that if a view (in this case, perspectivism itself) is an interpretation it is ipo facto wrong. This is not the case. To call any view, including perspectivism an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is actually false producing anther view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.

Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, and it attributes of a specific approach in truth as it is relationally determined by fact and justly untenable by those approaches in themselves. Still, it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, to be accounted for all theories, thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories, it does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world, neither the fact’s science addresses nor methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purpose for which they have been devised, but they have no priority over the many other purposes of human life.

The existence of many purposes and needs comparing with which the value of theories is established - another crucial element of perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply of rampant relativism, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes a theory can be devised. This con only that in Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value once and for all. Yet he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does no presuppose the existence of criteria’s application in all. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandoned that ideal, he considers irresoluble disagreements an essential part of being human life.

Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most sightful and powerful critics of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what remains in ours). His exploration of bringing forth an acknowledged unconscious motivation, and the conflict of opposing forces within the mindful purposes of possibilities of creative integration. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of mental processes and is aware of the conflict between unconscious instinctual impulses and wishes and inhibiting or repressing forces. Both Freud and Nietzsche are engaged in a redefinition of the root of subjectivity, a redefinition that replaces the moral problematic of selfishness with the economic problematic of what Freud would call narcissism, . . . Freud and Nietzsche elaborate upon the whole field of libidinal economy: The transit of the libido through other selves, aggression, infliction and reception of pain, and something very much like death, the total evacuation of the entire quantum of excitation that the organism is charged.

Nietzsche suggests that in our concern for the other, in our sacrifice for the other, we are concerned with ourselves, one part of ourselves represented by the other. That for which we sacrifice ourselves is unconsciously related to as another part of us. In relating to the other we are in fact also relating to a part of ourselves and we are concerned with our own pleasure and pain and our own expression of will to power. In one analysis of pity, Nietzsche states that, “we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves but are doing so strongly unconsciously.” He goes on to suggest that it be primarily our own pleasure and pain that we are concerned about and that the feelings and reactions that follow are multi-determined: “We never do anything of this kind out of one motive.”

The real world is flux and change for Nietzsche, but in his later works there is no “unknowable true world.” Also, the splits between a surface, apparent world and an unknowable but a true world of the things-in-themselves were, as is well known, a view Nietzsche rejected. For one thing, as Mary Warnock points out, Nietzsche was attempting to get across the point that there is only one world, not two. She also suggests that for Nietzsche, if we contribute anything to the world, it be the idea of a “thing,” and in Nietzsche’s words, “the psychological origin of the belief in things forbids us to speak of things-in-themselves.”

Nietzsche holds that there is an extra-mental world to which we are related and with which we have some kind of fit. For him, even as knowledge develops in the service of self-preservation and power, to be effective, a conception of reality will have a tendency to grasp (but only) a certain amount of, or aspect of, reality. However much Nietzsche may at times see (the truth of) artistic creation and dissimulation (out of chaos) as paradigmatic for science (which will not recognize itself as such), in arriving art this position Nietzsche assumes the truth of scientifically based beliefs as foundation for many of his arguments, including those regarding the origin, development and nature of perception, consciousness and self-consciousness and what this entails for our knowledge of and falsification of the external and inner world. In fact, to some extent the form-providing, affirmative, this-world healing of art is a response to the terrifying, nausea-inducing truths revealed by science that by itself had no treatment for the underlying cause of the nausea. Although Nietzsche also writes of the horrifying existential truths, against which science can attempt a [falsifying] defence. Nevertheless, while there is a real world to which we are affiliated, there is no sensible way to speak of a nature or constitution or eternal essence of the world by itself apart from description and perceptive. Also, states of affairs to which our interpretations are to fit are established within human perspectives and reflect (but not only) our interests, concerns, needs for calculability. While such relations (and perhaps as meta-commentary on the grounds of our knowing) Nietzsche is quite willing to write of the truth, the constitution of reality, and facts of the case. There appears of no restricted will to power, nor the privilege of absolute truth. To expect a pure desire for a pure truth is to expect an impossible desire for an illusory ideal.

The inarticulate come to rule supreme in oblivion, either in the individual’s forgetfulness or in those long stretches of the collective past that have never been and will never be called forth into the necessarily incomplete articulations of history, the record of human existence that is profusely interspersed with dark passages. This accounts for the continuous questing of archeology, palaeontology, anthropology, geology, and accounts, too, for Nietzsche’s warning against the “insomnia” of historicisms. As for the individual, the same drive is behind the modern fascination with the unconscious and, thus, with dreams, and it was Nietzsche who, before Freud, spoke of forgetting as an activity of the mind. At the beginning of his, Genealogy of Morals, he claims, in defiance of all psychological “shallowness,” that the lacunae of memory are not merely “passive” but the outcome of an active and positive “screening,” preventing us from remembering what would upset our equilibrium. Nietzsche is the first discoverer of successful “repression,” the burying of potential experience in the inarticulate that is, as moderately when the enemy territory is for him.

Still, he is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes once it is denied of its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religions, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escapes all this, the ‘Übermensch’, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style of his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist than the world warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave himself no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey who vests finds their style by exerting repulsive power over others. Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny does not help this problem, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writing is not always straightforward. Similarly, such anti-Semitism, as found in his work is in an equally balanced way as intensified denouncements of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater contempt of the German character of his time.

Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of the will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and fact. In particular, he anticipated many central tenets of postmodernism: An aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’, the denial of facts: The denial of essences, the celebration of the plurality of interpretations and of the fragmented and political discourse all for which are waiting their rediscovery in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his perspectives are echoed in the shifting array of literary devices -humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody with which he explores human life and history.

All the same, Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge: ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day’ (The Gay Science).

This position is very radical for Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification: He writes that we think truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quit e wrong about the latter.

Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if they were to make up knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts and precisely what there is not, only interpretations’.

It is often maintained that the affirmation within perspectivism is self-undermined, in that if the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued for, that a compound view is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, perhaps, on that point is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that not every view is an interpretation.

Nonetheless, this refutation assumes that if a view, as perspectivism itself, is an interpretation, it is by that very fact wrong. This is not so, however, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is actually false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.

Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, it attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts themselves. Still, it refused to envisage a single independent set of facts, and accounted for by all theories. Thus, Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories: He does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): Neither the fact’s science addresses nor the methods serve the purposes for which they have been devise: Nonetheless, these have no priority over the many others’ purposes of human life.

The existence of many purposes and needs for which the measure of theoretic possibilities is established -other crucial elements evolving perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply of a prevailing-over upon relativism, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value. However, he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in it. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issue s dividing them.

Nonetheless, this fact would not trouble Nietzsche, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal, but he considers irresoluble disagreement an essential part of human life.

Nature is the most apparent display of its obtaining work. It is wholly unconscious and acts solely out of necessity, such that no morality is involved. We are a part of this frightening where anything can happen anytime. However, this requires far too much intelligence for us to realize and rightly accept it totally. So we invent reasons for things that have no reason. We believe in our own falsification of nature. We produce, and delight in the perfection that is unnatural. All of the same time, we are to dwell along within nature, and, still, nature is fooling itself. Nietzsche accentuates that of all human actions are remnant fragments of those that appear as acceptably been conducted by some part of nature, are without much difficulty accomplished out of necessity. They are instincts we have developed for our own preservation. He believes the natural state is the best state, even in all its wantonness, and he calls people to open their ears to the purity of a nature without design. ‘The universe's box, which can never be called for as a melody’.

The Gay Science explains the problems with man humanizing nature. It is a fitting departure point because, through criticism, it states Nietzsche's regard for the unconsciousness of the will to power in nature. He fills this section with warning: 'Let us beware of thinking that the universe is a living being', he says. ‘Where should it expand?’ ‘On what should it feed?’ The universe lacks its own will to power. We can in no way identify with the universe, despite all our efforts.’We should not make it something essential, universal, and eternal’. Nietzsche is dispelling the notion that there is meaning in existence. He is saying that when all is said and done and gone, our universe doesn't matter. After all, it will destroy and create itself into eternity. It does not have a purpose, like a machine. Humans seek honour in the universe and we find honour in spite of any purposive inclusion. So tricking ourselves is easy as we have become conceited into believing that we are the purposes of the universe. All the power in the universe working toward producing our species of mammals! Yet let us be reasonable. Nietzsche calls the organic an 'exception of exceptions', where matter itself is an exception. We are not the secret aim, but a byproduct of unusual circumstances. It is an error to assume that all of the space behaves in the manner of that which immediately surrounds us. We cannot be sure of this uniformity. Nietzsche uses our surrounding stars as an example. He asserts that stars may very well exist whose orbits are not at all what we suppose? ‘Let us beware of attributing it to heartlessness and unreason and their opposites’. There is no intent, as there is no such accident, because this requires a purpose. All these things are disguises man has given the universe. They are false, but why should we beware? Nietzsche emphasizes our weakness as animals. We are the only animals that live against our natural inclinations. By suppressing our instincts, we become less and less equipped to exist as part of nature. If we continue living against our surroundings, we will be removed, not out of God's anger, but out of necessity.

Nietzsche reminds us that the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos. The only structure responsible for the necessity that reigns in nature is the will to power. The will to power begins in chaos. We find it unpleasant to think of our lives in these terms, because, stronger than our urge to deify nature is usually our urge to deify ourselves. We are merely living things. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.' There is no opposition, only will to power. The living and the dead are both made of the same basic materials. The difference is that when something is alive, its molecules reproduce. Again, Nietzsche focuses on the exceptions.

When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-veneration of nature? When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity through a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

Nietzsche divides human beings according to their creative power. The higher, creative humans see and hear more than the lower, who concern themselves with matters of man. This is a pattern found throughout nature: the higher animals experience more. In humans, the higher become at once happier and unhappier, because they are feeling more. Nietzsche calls these people the ‘poets’ who are creating the lives on stage, while the non-creative are exasperated ‘actors’. The actors could be better understood as spectators of the poets' performance. Poets’ thinks and feels harmoniously, matched with time; he is able continually to fashion something that did not previously exist. He created the entire world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations' studied by the actor. In our society, the actor is called practical, when it is the poet who is responsible for any value we place. By this, Nietzsche means that, since nothing has any meaning or value by nature, the poets are responsible because they are the ones who produce beauty. They are responsible for everything in the world that concerns man. They fail to recognize this, however, and remain unaware of their best power. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.

Our poets produce art. Art is the expression of perfect beauty that does not occur naturally. Human hands have given and conceived it by human minds; it is human nature. We are separate from the rest of the animal kingdom in our deviation from nature. Our instincts led us to delight in art as it distinguished itself and its creators as supernatural. We must wonder at nature becoming bored with ourselves, to create something better and, perhaps, slightly as perfect than it can become. What does nature know of perfection? It is the will to power, but a facet only exhibited in humans. All the same, in that it seems that art is meant to be as far removed from everything as naturally possible. Nietzsche uses the Greeks as an example of this pure art. They did not want fear and pity. To prevent these human emotions from interfering in the presentation of a writer's work, the Greeks would confine actors to narrow stages and restrict their facial expressions. The object was beautiful speech, with the presentation only meant to do the words justice, not to distract with dramatic interpretation. A more modern example is the opera. Nietzsche points out the insignificance of the words versus the music. What is the loss in not understanding an opera singer? In the present, art has degenerated so that its purpose is often to remind us of our humanity, much less to express that which is perfect. We listen for words that shackle us to the land in a medium that can elevate us above the rest. Art gives human life reason, purpose, and all the things we have attributed from God, but Art is true. It is the only meaning in life, because it is unnatural.

An examining consideration as arranged of human autonomy has of itself the designed particularity of interests, in that for Nietzsche conveys the predisposition for which it finds the preservation of the species. It is the oldest and strongest of our instincts, and it is the essence of why should we care about the survival of our race? It is not in our interest as. Yet we cannot avoid it. Nietzsche points out that even the most harmful men aid preservation by instilling instincts in the rest of us that a necessary for our survival. In that way they are largely responsible for it, but according to Nietzsche, we are no longer capable of ‘living badly’. That is, living in a way that goes against preservation of the human race: 'Above all, ', you will contribute to humanity.

Nietzsche reflected back to the contributions achieved through the afforded endeavours attributively generated of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, by comparison and consistence in their according attitude with their sense of nature. The seventeenth century was a time when humans lived closer to their instincts. An artist of that time would attempt to capture all that he could in art, removing himself as much as possible. In the eighteenth century, Nietzsche says that artists took the focus away from nature and put it on themselves. Art became social propaganda. It became more human. We are missing ‘the hatred of the lack of a sense of nature' that was present in the seventeenth century. Nietzsche writes of the nineteenth century with hope. He says people have become more concrete, more fearless. They are putting the 'health of the body ahead of the health of the soul'. It would appear that they are making a return to nature, except that if they reach it, it will be for the first time.

‘There has never yet been of a foremost advance in natural humanity. That is a humanity living according to their nature. Nietzsche stresses that we have become far too unnatural in our social and technical evolution. Humans have tried to exist above nature, condemning their own world (in fact, themselves) as if they were the only ones alive by the grace of. This is an obvious contradiction for Nietzsche. He believes first that, since human beings share the same relationship with nature as any other animal, we ought to live according to our instincts. We ought to do what comes naturally to us that which most reflects the will to power. He uses two examples of natural human behaviour (human instinct) to clarify. The first example is the search for knowledge, which is naturally occurring in all humans, whether they are conscious of it or not. The second is the way we perceive our rights in society. This is an example of humans living according to necessity. We act according to that which can be enforced. Punishment is our only deterrent. In that respect, we live naturally, but that is in resignation that we meet a superficial nature. If we could live in accord with that which governs our fellow creatures, we would discover our true selves, and realize our full potential as artists.

Nietzsche regards the evolution of human nature as a journey from the age of morality into the age of self consciousness, or the age of ridicule. He saw humanity of his time still living according to teachers of remorse, their so-called ‘heroes.’ These men inspired our faith in life, and our fear of death. They gave us false reasons for our existence, disguising it with the invention of a ‘teacher of the purpose of existence’. Nietzsche believes that the idea of God came about because it distracted people from their insignificance. What does one person count for in relation to the whole of society? Nothing, the preservation of the species is all that matter. We are mammals like any other. If by force or some orderly enforcement was to gain power and leadership for themselves, the ‘heroes’ taught us that we were significant in the eyes of God. They taught us to take ourselves seriously; that life is worth living because of this 'teacher of purpose'. We cling to this safety blanket that protects us from seeing us at eye level with the rest of the natural world because we cannot handle the true nature of the human race as a herd.

Nietzsche predicts that humans will evolve to the point where they can comprehend the true nature of their species. This realization brings ridicule to our lives. Nothing has been meaning that it is all random functioning at the hands of the will to power. We can no longer be solemn in our work, for how are we to take ourselves seriously when we have given up our blanket? It seems that we had lost our direction to the madness of nature and reason. We must remember that unreason is also essential for the preservation of the species.

In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations the Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology who asserts attention by unitizing contingently prescribed studies as a curriculum can quickly bind and serve as for his time must be accredited of it, embracing willfully a ‘new system for psychology?

In fact, several authors view many expressions as voiced in the aspects of Nietzsche’s work, for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb, as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by many authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. Surely, while being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, retired professors of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness with his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.

Closely to suggesting that dreams are to the conscious, and in particular, how Nietzsche alludes to precisely those lines from Oedipus the King, attempting to reassure Oedipus that many men before now in dream save lain with their mother - lines quoted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams in support from some primordial dream material. It is significant that the passage Nietzsche refers to and the wishes in regard to which he urges us to larn to take responsibility refer to the continuing presence in adulthood of sexual desires of the son for the mother. Of even greater importance than specific dream content is the fact that while in play it is the reliability of prophecies that is at issue, that is, whether or not the cream anticipates the future. Nietzsche turns his interpretation to what the dram tells us about our abominable shameful thoughts and desires for which we are reluctant take responsibility.

Nietzsche heralds a new methodology, he contrasts ‘metaphysical philosophy ‘ with his ‘historical [later genealogical] philosophy . His is a methodology for philosophical inquiry into the origins of human psychology, a methodology to be allied with the natural sciences. This inquiry ‘ca no longer be separated from natural science, and as he will do on other occasions, offer a call to those who might have the ears to hear. Will there be many with a desire to pursue such researches? Mankind likes to put question of origins and beginnings out of its mind, must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination?

In Totem and Taboo, completed in the spring of 1913, Freud is concerned with the origin of totemism - the worship of and periodic ceremonial sacrifice of a clan’s special identifying animal - and its relation to the origin of exogamy - the horror of incest and rule of marriage outside of one’s clan. That the beginnings of human society were constituted by a primal horde, a tyrannical father ruling a group of sons and having the women of the horde to himself. At some point the brothers rebelled at such brutal control (which included castration on occasion) and forced suppression of instinctual expression, and they killed and devoured their father. However, they soon recognized that continued rivalry over the women for which the group would jeopardize cohesiveness necessary for safety, security and survival. Also, since their feelings for the father were ambivalent, after the deed was accomplished, feelings of affection and remorse emerged. Due to tese factors, the brothers wound up depriving themselves of the women of the group. They revoked their deed by not killing the totem (created as a substitute for the father) except under special ceremoniously prescribed circumstances, The reflecting the ambivalence of their relationship to and identification with the primal father.

Freud alo speculated that the origins of totem were related to condition o the Oedipus complex, that is, the two prohibitions of totemism, not to kill the totem or have sexual relations with a women in the same group, coincide with the two primal wishes of children (in this instance, the boy) to kill the father and sexually posses the mother. Freud goes on to suggest that unconscious memory and guilt over the original deed have been culturally transmitted (it is in this work that Freud forcefully reintroduces the term ‘Oedipus complex’ after having first used it in 1910.) Along with generic transmissions of certain psychological underpinning and the possibility of the transmission of memory traces and form the basis or foundation upon which is built present-day neurosis. Freud will rework these themes through the remainder of his life, first times more or less emphasizing his belief in the actual occurrence of the primal parricide and its phylogenetic transmission versus what might be regarded as a more allegorical reading.

Further, in his many writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanism, repression, suppression, overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between individuals etc., As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means to alleviate human crises and despair.



These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based). Nietzsche’s has influenced and affected methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on ideas that are both displayed in it and developed by it -ideas such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.

Nonetheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology are not in passing over, but collectively strict and well-set in determining each general standard to assailing mortality. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud. Nietzsche is profound and significant, for the actual psychotherapeutic treatment. The reason as for this difference lie in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, and in the variation in the intellectual soil, that nourished and nurtured the two giant savants' views, doctrines (that is, the scholarly academic savants' philosophical and historical roots and influences) and the manners according to which they have been devised and designed.

Before anything else, the question of Nietzsche's historical critique, as might that we will recall of how one featuring narrative has been drawn from the texts, that we had read earlier, was a rapidly developing interest in and used for the enormously powerful historical criticism developed by Enlightenment thinkers. It is a way of undermining the authority of traditional power structures and the fundamental beliefs that sustain them.

We saw, for example, how in Descartes's Discourse on Method, Descartes offers a hypothetical historical narrative to undermine the authority of the Aristotelians and a faith in an eternal unchanging natural order. Then, we discussed how in the Discourse on Inequality, based on an imaginative reconstruction of the history of human society, Rousseau, following Descartes's lead but extending it to other areas (and much more aggressively), can encourage in the mind of the reader the view that evil in life is the product of social injustice (rather than, say, the result of Original Sin or the lack of virtue in the lower orders). We have in addition of reading Kant, Marx, and Darwin how a historical understanding applied to particular phenomena undercut traditional notions of eternal truths enshrined in any particular beliefs (whether in species, in religious values, or in final purposes).

Nonetheless, this is a crucial point, the Enlightenment thinker, particularly Kant and Rousseau and Marx, do not allow history to undermine all sources of meaning; For them, beyond its unanswerable power to dissolve traditional authority, history holds out the promise of a new grounding for rational meaning, in the growing power of human societies to become rational, to, and in one word, progress. Thus, history, beyond revealing the inadequacies of many traditional power structures and sources of meaning, had also become the best hope and proof for a firm faith in a new eternal order: The faith in progressive reform or revolution. This, too, is clearly something Wollstonecraft pins her hopes on (although, as we saw, how radical her emplacements continue as of a matter to debate).

On this point, as we also saw, Darwin, at least in the Origin of Species, is ambiguous -almost as if, knowing he is on very slippery ground, he doesn't want his readers to recognize the full metaphysical and epistemological implications of his theory of the history of life. Because of this probably deliberate ambiguities that we variously interpreted Darwin as offering either a "progressive" view of evolution, something that we could adapt to the Enlightenment's faith in rational progress or, alternatively, as presenting a contingent view of the history of life, a story without progress or final goal or overall purposes.

Well, in Nietzsche (as in the view of Darwin) there is no such ambiguity. Darwin made his theory public for the first time in a paper delivered to the Linnean Society in 1858. The paper begins, “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external natures.” In the Origins of Species, Darwin is more specific about the character of this war, “There must be in every species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” All these assumptions are apparent in Darwin’s definition of natural selection: If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed, if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of an increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this cannot be disputed, as then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their condition of life . . . , this will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest is so called the Natural Selection.

Similarly, clusters of distributed brain areas undertake individual linguistic symbols and are not produced in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in dedicated regions. Nevertheless, the symbolic and referential relationship between words is generated through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations of simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require an active role from other regions. The symbol meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between strings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing more about, the neuronal processes applied therein. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

With that, let us include two aspects of biological reality, its more complex order in biological reality may be associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the parts, and the entire biosphere is a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts ( the attributive view that all organisms (*parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (*whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole). If this is the case, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complex systems marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense pre-ordained or predestined by natural process. Nonetheless, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.

Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language systems that are particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm as separately distinct from the material realm. It was, moreover the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his dualism to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.

Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and difference and is governed by a principle of organization determining the inter-relationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts that make up the whole, although the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, “is nothing really by itself. It is the way the parts are organized, and not another constituent additional to those that make up the totality.”

In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be “internal or immanent” in the parts, as opposed to a more spurious whole in which parts appear to announce of wholeness due to relationships that are external to the parts. The collection of parts that would allegedly make up the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts constitute a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and by that adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relation between parts and whole in modern biology.

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that shows progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness shows self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.

However, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, if one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific description of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.

This understanding can, of course, be achieved by those who have no interest in ontology and/or feel that the vision of physical reality showed in modern physical theory has nothing to do with ontology. Belief in ontology is not required to understand the implications of modern physical theories or to use this understanding to conceive of better ways to coordinate human experience in the interest of survival. It is also possible that threats to this survival could be eliminated based on a pragmatic acceptance of the actual conditions and terms for sustaining and protecting human life.

Religious thinkers can enter this dialogue knowing that metaphysical question’s no longer lie within the province of science and that science cannot in principle dismiss or challenge belief in spiritual reality. Nevertheless, if these thinkers elect to challenge the truths of science within its own domain, they must either withdraw from the dialogue or engage science on its own terms. Applying metaphysics where there is no metaphysics, or attempting to rewrite or rework scientific truths and/or facts in proving metaphysical assumptions, merely displays a profound misunderstanding of science and an apparent unwillingness to recognize its success. Yet it is also true that the study of science can indirectly serve to reinforce belief in profoundly religious truths while not claiming to legislate the ultimate character of these truths.

For Nietzsche, the ironies of history go all the way down and disfranchise all claims to the Truth, as Nietzsche is the first major thinker to take seriously the full implications of the historical critique and to apply it to all of a culture's most cherished possessions: It’s science, religion, morality, politics, faith in progress, science, language, in short, everything.

Every schoolchild learns eventually that Nietzsche was the author of the shocking slogan, "God is dead." However, what makes that statements possible are another claim, even more shocking in its implications: "Only that which has no history can be defined" (Genealogy of Morals). Since Nietzsche was the heir to seventy-five years of German historical scholarship, he knew that there was no such thing as something that has no history. Darwin had, as Dewey points out that essay we examined, effectively shown that searching for a true definition of a species is not only futile but unnecessary (since the definition of a species is something temporary, something that changes over time, without any permanent lasting and stable reality). Nietzsche dedicates his philosophical work to doing the same for all cultural values.

Reflecting it for a moment on the full implications of this claim is important. You will remember (no doubt) how in Liberal Studies we started our study of moral philosophy with the Memo, the diabetic exchange with which explores the question "What is virtue?" That takes a firm withstanding until we can settle that of the issue with a definition that eludes all cultural qualification. What virtue is, that we cannot effectively deal with morality, accept through divine dispensation, unexamined reliance on traditions, skepticism, or relativism (the position of Thrasymachus). The full exploration of what dealing with that question of definition might require takes’ place in the Republic.

Many texts we read subsequently took up Plato's challenge, seeking to discover, through reason, a permanent basis for understanding knowledge claims and moral values. No matter what the method, as Nietzsche points out in his first section, the belief was always that grounding knowledge and morality in truth was possible and valuable, that the activity of seeking to ground morality was conducive to a fuller good life, individually and communally.

To use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, we can say that previous systems of thought had sought to provide a true transcript of the book of nature. They made claims about the authority of one true text. Nietzsche insists repeatedly that there be no single canonical text; There are only interpretations. So, there is no appeal to some definitive version of Truth (whether we search in philosophy, religion, or science). Thus the Socratic quest for some way to tie morality down to the ground, so that it does not fly away, is (and has always been) futile, although the long history of attempts to do so has disciplined the European mind so that we, or a few of us, are ready to move into dangerous new territory where we can situate the most basic assumptions about the need for conventional morality to the test and move on "beyond good and evil," that is, to a place where we do not take the universalizing concerns and claims of traditional morality seriously.

Nietzsche begins his critique here by challenging that fundamental assumption: Who says that seeking the truth is better for human beings? How do we know an untruth is not better? What is truth anyway? In doing so, he challenges the sense of purpose basic to the traditional philosophical endeavour. Philosophers, he points out early, may be proud of the way they begin by challenging and doubting received ideas. However, they never challenge or doubt the key notion they all start with, namely, that there is such a thing as the Truth and that it is something valuable for human beings (surely much more valuable than its opposite).

In other words, just as the development of the new science had gradually and for many painfully and rudely emptied nature of any certainty about a final purpose, about the possibilities for ever agreeing of the ultimate value of scientific knowledge, so Nietzsche is, with the aid of new historical science (and the proto-science of psychology) emptying all sources of cultural certainty of their traditional purposiveness and claims to permanent truth, and therefore of their value, as we traditionally understood that of the term. There is thus no antagonism between good and evil, since all versions of equal are equally fictive (although some may be more useful for the purposes of living than others).

At this lodging within space and time, I really do not want to analyse the various ways Nietzsche deals with this question. Nevertheless, I do want to insist upon the devastating nature of his historical critique on all previous systems that have claimed to ground knowledge and morality on a clearly defined truth of things. For Nietzsche's genius rests not only on his adopting the historical critique and applying to new areas but much more on his astonishing perspicuity in seeing just how extensive and flexible the historical method might be.

For example, Nietzsche, like some of those before him, insists that value systems are culturally determined they arise, he insists, as often as not form or in reaction to conventional folk wisdom. Yet to this he adds something that to us, after Freud, may be well accepted, but in Nietzsche's hands become something as shocking: Understanding of a system of value is, he claims, requires us more than anything else to see it as the product of a particular individual's psychological history, a uniquely personal confession. Relationship to something called the "Truth" has nothing to do with the "meaning" of a moral system; as an alternative we seek its coherence in the psychology of the philosopher who produced it.

Gradually, in having grown into a greater clarity of what every great philosophy has endearingly become, as staying in the main theme of personal confessions, under which a kind of involuntary and an unconscious memoir and largely that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy formed the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

A concentration has here unmasked claims to “truth” upon the history of the life of the person proposing the particular "truth" this time. Systems offering us a route to the Truth are simply psychologically produced fictions that serve the deep (often unconscious) purposes of the individual proposing them. Therefore they are what Nietzsche calls "foreground" truths. They do not penetrate into the deep reality of nature, and, yet, to fail to see this is to lack "perspective."

Even more devastating is Nietzsche's extension of the historical critique to language itself. Since philosophical systems deliver themselves to us in language, that language shapes them and by the history of that language. Our Western preoccupation with the inner self for which perceivable determinates, wills, and so forth, Nietzsche can place a value on as, in large part, the product of grammar, the result of a language that builds its statements around a subject and a predicate. Without that historical accident, Nietzsche affirms, we would not have committed an error into mistaking for the truth something that is a by-product of our particular culturally determined language system.

He makes the point, for example, that our faith in consciousness is just an accident. If instead of saying "I think," we were to say "Thinking is going on in my body," then we would not be tempted to give the "I," some independent existence (e.g., in the mind) and make large claims about the ego or the inner self. The reason we do search for such an entity stem from the accidental construction of our language, which encourages us to use a subject (the personal pronoun) and a verb. The same false confidence in language also makes it easy for us to think that we know clearly what key things like "thinking" and "willing" are; Whereas, if we were to engage in even a little reflection, we would quickly realize that the inner processes neatly summed up by these apparently clear terms is anything but clear. His emphasis on the importance of psychology as queen of the sciences underscores his sense of how we need to understand more fully just how complex these activities are, particularly the emotional appetites, before we talk about them so simplistically, the philosophers that concurrently have most recently done.

This remarkable insight enables Nietzsche, for example, at one blow and with cutting contempt devastatingly to dismiss as "trivial" the system Descartes had set up so carefully in the Meditations. Descartes's triviality consists in failing to recognize how the language he imprisons, shapes his philosophical system as an educated European, using and by his facile treatment of what thinking is in the first place. The famous Cartesian dualism is not a central philosophical problem but an accidental by-product of grammar designed to serve Descartes' own particular psychological needs. Similarly Kant's discovery of "new faculties" Nietzsche derides as just a trick of language - a way of providing what looks like an explanation and is, in fact, as ridiculous as the old notions about medicines putting people to sleep because they have the sleeping virtue.

It should be clear from examples like this (and the others throughout the text) that there is very little capability of surviving Nietzsche's onslaught, for what are there to which we can points to which did not have a history or deliver itself to us in a historically developing system of language? After all, our scientific enquiries in all areas of human experience teach us that nothing is ever, for everything is always becoming.

Nietzsche had written that with repression of instincts and their turn inward, ‘the entire inner worlds, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and heighten the same writing of;’bad conscience’ . . . [as] the womb of all ideal nd imaginative phenomena . . . an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation and perhaps beauty itself.

The ramifications in the finding of an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to object but fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out.

The development of the ego consists in a departure from the primary narcissism and result in a vigorous attempt to recover that stater. This departure is caused by means of the displacement of the libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without, and satisfaction is caused from fulfilling this ideal.

At the same time the ego has sent out the libidinal object-cathexes, it becomes impoverished in favour of these cathexes itself once more from its satisfactions in respect of the object, just as it does by fulfilling its ideal.



Freud considers the implications of such finds for his dual instinct Theory which divides instincts into the duality of ego instinct and libidinal instincts. Freud questions this division, but does not definitely abandon it, which he will do within Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

As indicted, one of Freud’s important points is that the ego makes vigorous attempts to recover its state of primary narcissism. This is related to important themes we relate to others on the basis of projections of idealized images we are loving ourselves and aggrandizing ourselves in activities which would seem to be reflective of contrary motivations.

As a mother gives to her child that of which she deprives herself . . . is it does not clear that in [such] instances man loves something of himself . . . more than something else of themselves . . . the inclinations for something (wishes, impulse, desire) is present in al [such] instances to give in to it, with all the consequences, are in any even not ‘unegoistic’.

As Freud is entering his study of the destructive instincts - the death instinct and its manifestations outward as aggression a well as its secondary turn back inward upon itself - might wonder if Nietzsche, who had explored the vicissitude’s of aggression and was famous for his concept of will to power, was among the ‘all kids of things’ Freud was reading. At least it is clear that Freud had the ‘recurrence of the same’ on his mind during his period. And while Feud’s pessimism and emphasis on pleasure during this period. And while Freud’s through release of or discharge of and decreases of tension have strong affinities with Schopenhauer, there is the somewhat different ‘pleasure ‘of Eros’.



One point to be made is that Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power was an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle and Beyond good and evil. A principle of which, as for Nietzsche the primary drives to ward-off its primitive and more sublimated manifestations. All the same, pain is an essential ingredient since it is not a state attained at the end of suffering but the process of overcoming itself (as of obstacles and suffering)that the central factor in the experience of an increase of power and joy.

Freud writes of as no other kind or level of mastery, the binding of instinctual impulses that is a preparatory act. Although this binding and the replacement of primary process with the secondary process operate before and without necessary regard for ‘the development of unpleasure, the transformation occurs on behalf of the pleasure principle, the binding is the preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle . . . The binding . . . [is] designed to preparatory excitement for its final elimination in the pleasure of discharge.

For the individual who suffers this repeated and frustrated effect of pleasure, it is not only the object of the past that cannot be recovered, nor the relation that cannot be restored or reconstructed. Nevertheless, it is time itself that resists the human ill and proves is unyielding. Between pleasure and satisfaction, a prohibition or negation of pleasure is enacted which necessitates the endless repetition and proliferation of thwarted pleasures. The repetition is a vain effort to stay, or indeed, to reverse time, such repetition reveals a rancor against the present which feeds upon itself.

However at this point we might be tempted, as many have been, to point to the new natural science as a counter-instance that typifies the dulling of natural science of a progressive realization of the truth of the world, or at least a closer and closer approximation to that truth? In fact, it is interesting to think about just how closely Kuhn and Nietzsche might be linked in their views about the relationship between science and the truth of things or to what extent modern science might not provide the most promising refutation of Nietzsche's assertion that there is no privileged access to a final truth of things (a hotly disputed topic in the last decade or more). It is say here that for Nietzsche science is just another "foreground" way of interpreting nature. It has no privileged access to the Truth, although he does concede that, compared with other beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on sense experience and therefore is more useful for modern times.

There is one important point to stress in this review of the critical power of Nietzsche's project. Noting that Nietzsche is not calling us to a task for having beliefs is essential. We have to have beliefs. Human life must be the affirmation of values; Otherwise, it is not life. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is centrally concerned to mock us for believing that our belief systems are True, are fixed, are somehow eternally right by a grounded standard of knowledge. Human life, in its highest forms, must be lived in the full acceptance that the values we create for ourselves are fictions. We, or the best of us, have to have the courage to face the fact that there is no "Truth" upon which to ground anything in which we believe; we must in the full view of that harsh insight, but affirm ourselves with joy. The Truth is not accessible to our attempts at discovery; What thinking human beings characteristically do, in their pursuit of the Truth, is creating their own truths.

Now, this last point, like the others, has profound implications for how we think of ourselves, for our conception of the human self. Because human individuals, like human cultures, also have a history. Each of us has a personal history, and thus we ourselves cannot be defined; we, too, are in a constant process of becoming, of transcending the person we have been into something new. We may like to think of ourselves as defined by some essential rational quality, but in fact we are not. In stressing this, of course, Nietzsche links himself with certain strains of Romanticism, especially (from the point of view of our curriculum) with William Blake and, for those who took the American Adam seminar, with Emerson and Thoreau.

This tradition of Romanticism holds up a view of life that is radically individualistic, self-created, self-generated. "I must create my own system or become enslaved by another man's" Blake wrote. It is also thoroughly aristocratic, with little room for traditional altruism, charity, or egalitarianism. Our lives to realize their highest potential should be lived in solitude from others, except perhaps those few we recognize as kindred souls, and our life's efforts must be a spiritually demanding but joyful affirmation of the process by which we maintain the vital development of our imaginative conceptions of ourselves.

Contrasting this view of the self as a constantly developing entity might be appropriate here, without essential permanence, with Marx's view. Marx, too, insists on the process of transformation of the self and ideas of the self, but for him, as we discussed, the material forces control the transformation of production, and these in turn are driven by the logic of history. It is not something that the individual takes charge of by an act of individual will, because individual consciousness, like everything else, emerges form and is dependent upon the particular historical and material circumstances, the stage in the development of production, of the social environment in which the individual finds himself or herself.

Nietzsche, like Marx, and unlike later Existentialists, de Beauvoir, for example, recognizes that the individual inherits particular things from the historical moment of the culture (e.g., the prevailing ideas and, particularly, the language and ruling metaphors). Thus, for Nietzsche the individual is not totally free of all context. However, the appropriate response to this is not, as in Marx, the development of class consciousness, a solidarity with other citizens and an imperative to help history along by committing oneself to the class war alongside other proletarians, but in the best and brightest spirits, a call for a heightened sense of an individuality, of one's radical separation from the herd, of one's final responsibility to one's own most fecund creativity.

Because Nietzsche and the earlier Romantics are not simply saying, we should do what we like is vital. They all have a sense that self-creation of the sort they recommend requires immense spiritual and emotional discipline -the discipline of the artist shaping his most important original creation following the stringent demands of his creative imagination. These demands may not be rational, but they are not permissively relativistic in that 1960's sense ("If it feels good, do it"). Permissiveness may have often been attributed to this Romantic tradition, a sort of 1960's “Boogie til you drop" ethic, but that is not what any of them had in mind. For Nietzsche that would simply be a herd response to a popularized and bastardized version of a much higher call to a solitary life lived with the most intense but personal joy, suffering, insight, courage, and imaginative discipline.

This aspect of Nietzsche's thought represents the fullest nineteenth-century European affirmation of a Romantic vision of the self as radically individualistic (at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marx's views of the self as socially and economically determined). It has had, as I hope to mention briefly next week, a profound and lasting effect in the twentieth century as we become ever more uncertain about coherent social identities and thus increasingly inclined to look for some personal way to take full charge of our own identities without answering to anyone but ourselves.

Much of the energy and much of the humour in Nietzsche's prose comes from the urgency with which he sees such creative self-affirmation as essential if the human species is not going to continue to degenerate. For Nietzsche, human beings are, primarily, biological creatures with certain instinctual drives. The best forms of humanity are those of whom most excellently express the most important of these biological drives, the "will to power," by which he means the individual will to assume of oneself and create what he or she needs, to live most fully. Such a "will to power" is beyond morality, because it does not answer to anyone's system of what makes up good and bad conduct. The best and strongest human beings are those of whom create a better quality in values for themselves, live by them, and refuse to acknowledge their common links with anyone else, other than other strong people who do the same and are thus their peers.

His surveys of world history have convinced Nietzsche that the development of systems has turned this basic human drive against human beings of morality favouring the weak, the suffering, the sick, the criminal, and the incompetent (all of whom he lumps together in that famous phrase "the herd"). He salutes the genius of those who could accomplish this feat (especially the Jews and Christians), which he sees as the revenge of the slaves against their natural masters. From this century -long acts of revenge, human beings are now filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, jealousy, and mediocrity, a condition alleviated, if at all, by dreams of being helpful to others and of an ever-expanding democracy, an agenda powerfully served by modern science (which serves to bring everything and everyone down to the same level). Fortunately, however, this ordeal has trained our minds splendidly, so that the best and brightest (the new philosophers, the free spirits) can move beyond the traditional boundaries of morality, that is, "beyond good and evil" (his favourite metaphor for this condition is the tensely arched bow ready to shoot off an arrow).

Stressing it is important, as I mentioned above, that Nietzsche does not believe that becoming such a "philosopher of the future" is easy or for everyone. It is, by contrast, an extraordinarily demanding call, and those few capable of responding to it might have to live solitary lives without recognition of any sort. He is demanding an intense spiritual and intellectual discipline that will enable the new spirit to move into territory no philosopher has ever roamed before, a displacing medium where there are no comfortable moral resting places and where the individual will probably (almost unquestionably) has to pursue of a profoundly lonely and perhaps dangerous existence (so the importance of another favourite metaphor of his, the mask). Nevertheless, this is the only way we can counter the increasing degeneration of European man into a practical, democratic, technocratic, altruistic herd animal.

By way of a further introduction to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, it would only offer an extended analogy, something that emerged from a seminar discussion, in that, I apologize that the opening parts of this paper may be familiar to some. Still, I hope quickly to extend some remarks into directions that have not yet been explore.

Before placing the analogy on the table, however, I wish to issue a caveat. Analogies may really help to clarify, but they can also influence us by some unduly persuasive influences of misleading proportions. I hope that the analogy I offer will provide such clarity, but not at the price of oversimplifying. So, as you listen to this analogy, you need to address the questions: To what extent does this analogy not hold? To what extent does it reduce the complexity of what Nietzsche is saying into a simpler form?

The analogy I want to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which several different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness.

These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups: French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or what possesses you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities.

The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; Some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. They might combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues.

When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically, what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many participants in anyone game has been aggressively convinced that their game is the "true" game, which it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent much time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Therefore, in addition anyone game itself, within the group pursuing it there has always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on.

Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship that shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin that can be historically found.

Rule books are written in languages that have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: The games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive game’s people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveals something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore "true" in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it was, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness.

In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book; He points out that nature is "wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain simultaneously: Imagine indifference itself as a power -how could you live according to this indifference. Living-is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature.” Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such rule books are mere "foreground" pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule manuals often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture, thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages that insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement.

So how do we know what we have is the truth? Why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true, but why? Might they not be better if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, deal with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, "only that which has no history can be defined," they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.

Furthermore these historical changes and developments occur accidentally, for contingent reasons, and have nothing to do with the games, or anyone game, shaping itself according to any ultimate game or any given rule book of games given by the wilderness, which is indifferent to what is going on. There is no basis for the belief that, if we look at the history of the development of these games, we discover some progressive evolution of games toward some higher type. We may be able, like Darwin, to trace historical genealogies, to construct a narrative, but that narrative does not reveal any clear direction or any final goal or any progressive development. The genealogy of games suggests that history be a record of contingent change. The assertion that there is such a thing as progress is simply another game, another rule added by inventive minds (who need to believe in progress); it bears no relationship to nature beyond the sports complex.

While one is playing on a team, one follows the rules and thus has a sense of what form right and wrong or good and evil conduct in the game. All those carrying out the same endeavour share this awareness. To pick up the ball in soccer is evil (unless you are the goalie), and to punt the ball while running in American football is permissible but stupid; in Australian football both actions are essential and right. In other words, different cultural communities have different standards of right and wrong conduct. The artificial inventions have determined these called rule books, one for each game. These rule books have developed the rules historically; Thus, they have no permanent status and no claim to privileged access.

Now, at this point you might be thinking about the other occasion in which I introduced a game analogy, namely, in the discussions of Aristotle's Ethics. For Aristotle also acknowledges that different political systems have different rules of conduct. Still, Aristotle believes that an examination of different political communities will enable one to derive certain principles common to them all, bottom-up generalizations that will then provide the basis for reliable rational judgment on which game is being played better, on what was good play in any particular game, on whether or not a particular game is being conducted well or not.

In other words, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.

Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.

If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access at all to that text. What we do have accessed to conflicting interpretations, none of them based on privileged access to a "true" text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.

Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.

Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer. Without that the game could not continue in its traditional way. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness itself.

Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as "bad" those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct oneself. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.

However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.

For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.

So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the PA system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.

This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he's moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.

For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.

Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some "truth."

Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds -a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.

What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of "help your neighbour," now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).

The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.

First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.

Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called "happiness." Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon.

This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.

There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.

For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our "will to power." So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For we are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.

So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.

The nihilists have discovered half this insight, but, because they are not capable of living the full awareness, they are very limited human beings.

The third group of people, that small minority that includes Nietzsche himself, is those who accept the game’s metaphor, see the fictive nature of all systems of knowledge and morality, and accept the challenge that to be most fully human is to create a new game, to live a life governed by rules imposed by the dictates of one's own creative nature. To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.

This call to live the self-created life, affirming oneself in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a self-generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.

Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules I devise and the language I frame them in will ordinarily owe a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although I am changing the rules for my game, my starting point, or the rules I have available to change, are given to me by my moment in history. So in moving forward, in creating something that will transcend the past, I am using the materials of the past. Existing games are the materials out of which I fashion my new game.

Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.

The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.

Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.

Now, I have put this analogy on the table to help clarify some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.

So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.

Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of "truth" of the sort we had in earlier centuries, or, as we will see in the poetry of Eliot, lamenting the collapse of traditional systems of value. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful self-affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.

After this rapid and, I hope, useful construction and description of an analogy, as only one final point that remains: So how have we responded and are we still responding to all of this? What of an impact has this powerful challenge to our most confident traditions had? Well, there is not time here to trace the complex influence of Nietzsche's thought in a wide range of areas. That influence has been immense and continues still. However, I would like to sketch a few points about what may be happening right now.

Here I must stress that I am offering a personal review, which an expertise does not inform in this question. Still, any general reading in modern studies of culture suggests that responses to Nietzsche are important and diverse. His stock has been very bullish for the past two decades, at least.

One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to self-create our own lives, to come up with new self-descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.

Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.

Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.

A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.

To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudo-scientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.

Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history; Renouncing that simply of diverting intellectuals away from social injustice. No wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists allied and the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.

Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.

Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and so on. An important recent example such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.

Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while at the same time recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constant metaphorical self-definition.

To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy I started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the PA system in a way no to which one bothered to attend; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.

You may recall how, in Book X of the Republic, Plato talks about the "ancient war between poetry and philosophy." What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)

Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets itself up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets itself up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.

Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers is mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know. Therefore, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: "Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry." Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.

One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.

Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own "confession" of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.

Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most sightful and powerful critics of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what remains in ours). His exploration of bringing forth an acknowledged unconscious motivation, and the conflict of opposing forces within the mindful purposes of possibilities of creative integration. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of mental processes and is aware of the conflict between unconscious instinctual impulses and wishes and inhibiting or repressing forces. Both Freud and Nietzsche are engaged in a redefinition of the root of subjectivity, a redefinition that replaces the moral problematic of selfishness with the economic problematic of what Freud would call narcissism, . . . Freud and Nietzsche elaborate upon the whole field of libidinal economy: The transit of the libido through other selves, aggression, infliction and reception of pain, and something very much like death, the total evacuation of the entire quantum of excitation that the organism is charged.

Nietzsche suggests that in our concern for the other, in our sacrifice for the other, we are concerned with ourselves, one part of ourselves represented by the other. That for which we sacrifice ourselves is unconsciously related to as another part of us. In relating to the other we are in fact also relating to a part of ourselves and we are concerned with our own pleasure and pain and our own expression of will to power. In one analysis of pity, Nietzsche states that, “we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves but are doing so strongly unconsciously.” He goes on to suggest that it be primarily our own pleasure and pain that we are concerned about and that the feelings and reactions that follow are multi-determined: “We never do anything of this kind out of one motive.”

The real world is flux and change for Nietzsche, but in his later works there is no “unknowable true world.” Also, the splits between a surface, apparent world and an unknowable but a true world of the things-in-themselves were, as is well known, a view Nietzsche rejected. For one thing, as Mary Warnock points out, Nietzsche was attempting to get across the point that there is only one world, not two. She also suggests that for Nietzsche, if we contribute anything to the world, it be the idea of a “thing,” and in Nietzsche’s words, “the psychological origin of the belief in things forbids us to speak of things-in-themselves.”

Nietzsche holds that there is an extra-mental world to which we are related and with which we have some kind of fit. For him, even as knowledge develops in the service of self-preservation and power, to be effective, a conception of reality will have a tendency to grasp (but only) a certain amount of, or aspect of, reality. However much Nietzsche may at times see (the truth of) artistic creation and dissimulation (out of chaos) as paradigmatic for science (which will not recognize itself as such), in arriving art this position Nietzsche assumes the truth of scientifically based beliefs as foundation for many of his arguments, including those regarding the origin, development and nature of perception, consciousness and self-consciousness and what this entails for our knowledge of and falsification of the external and inner world. In fact, to some extent the form-providing, affirmative, this-world healing of art is a response to the terrifying, nausea-inducing truths revealed by science that by itself had no treatment for the underlying cause of the nausea. Although Nietzsche also writes of the horrifying existential truths, against which science can attempt a [falsifying] defence. Nevertheless, while there is a real world to which we are affiliated, there is no sensible way to speak of a nature or constitution or eternal essence of the world in and of itself apart from description and perceptive. Also, states of affairs to which our interpretations are to fit are established within human perspectives and reflect (but not only) our interests, concerns, needs for calculability. While such relations (and perhaps as meta-commentary on the grounds of our knowing) Nietzsche is quite willing to write of the truth, the constitution of reality, and facts of the case. There appears of no restricted will to power, nor the privilege of absolute truth. To expect a pure desire for a pure truth is to expect an impossible desire for an illusory ideal.

The inarticulate come to rule supreme in oblivion, either in the individual’s forgetfulness or in those long stretches of the collective past that have never been and will never be called forth into the necessarily incomplete articulations of history, the record of human existence that is profusely interspersed with dark passages. This accounts for the continuous questing of archeology, palaeontology, anthropology, geology, and accounts, too, for Nietzsche’s warning against the “insomnia” of historicisms. As for the individual, the same drive is behind the modern fascination with the unconscious and, thus, with dreams, and it was Nietzsche who, before Freud, spoke of forgetting as an activity of the mind. At the beginning of his, Genealogy of Morals, he claims, in defiance of all psychological “shallowness,” that the lacunae of memory are not merely “passive” but the outcome of an active and positive “screening,” preventing us from remembering what would upset our equilibrium. Nietzsche is the first discoverer of successful “repression,” the burying of potential experience in the inarticulate that is, as moderately when the enemy territory is for him.

Still, he is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes once it is denied of its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religions, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escapes all this, the ‘Übermensch’, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style of his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist than the world warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave himself no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey who vests finds their style by exerting repulsive power over others. Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny does not help this problem, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writing is not always straightforward. Similarly, such anti-Semitism, as found in his work is in an equally balanced way as intensified denouncements of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater contempt of the German character of his time.

Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of the will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and fact. In particular, he anticipated many central tenets of postmodernism: An aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’, the denial of facts: The denial of essences, the celebration of the plurality of interpretations and of the fragmented and political discourse all for which are waiting their rediscovery in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his perspectives are echoed in the shifting array of literary devices -humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody with which he explores human life and history.

All the same, Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge: ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day’ (The Gay Science).

This position is very radical for Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification: He writes that we think truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quit e wrong about the latter.

Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if they were to make up knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts and precisely what there is not, only interpretations’.

It is often maintained that the affirmation within perspectivism is self-undermined, in that if the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued for, that a compound view is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, perhaps, on that point is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that not every view is an interpretation.

Nonetheless, this refutation assumes that if a view, as perspectivism itself, is an interpretation, it is by that very fact wrong. This is not so, however, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is actually false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.

Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, it attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts themselves. Still, it refused to envisage a single independent set of facts, and accounted for by all theories. Thus, Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories: He does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): Neither the fact’s science addresses nor the methods serve the purposes for which they have been devise: Nonetheless, these have no priority over the many others’ purposes of human life.

The existence of many purposes and needs for which the measure of theoretic possibilities is established -other crucial elements evolving perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply of a prevailing-over upon relativism, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value. However, he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in it. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issue s dividing them.

Nonetheless, this fact would not trouble Nietzsche, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal, but he considers irresoluble disagreement an essential part of human life.

Nature is the most apparent display of the will to power at work. It is wholly unconscious and acts solely out of necessity, such that no morality is involved. We are a part of this frightening chaos where anything can happen anytime. However, this requires far too much intelligence for us to realize and rightly accept it totally. So we invent reasons for things that have no reason. We believe in our own falsification of nature. We produce art, and delight in the perfection that is unnatural. All of the same time, we are to dwell along within nature, and, still, nature is fooling itself. Nietzsche accentuates that of all human actions are remnant fragments of those that appear as acceptably been conducted by some part of nature, are without much difficulty accomplished out of necessity. They are instincts we have developed for our own preservation. He believes the natural state is the best state, even in all its wantonness, and he calls people to open their ears to the purity of a nature without design. ‘The universe's music box repeats eternally its tune, which can never be called for as a melody’.

The Gay Science explains the problems with man humanizing nature. It is a fitting departure point because, through criticism, it states Nietzsche's regard for the unconsciousness of the will to power in nature. He fills this section with warning: 'Let us beware of thinking that the universe is a living being', he says. ‘Where should it expand?’ ‘On what should it feed?’ The universe lacks its own will to power. We can in no way identify with the universe, despite all our efforts.’We should not make it something essential, universal, and eternal’. Nietzsche is dispelling the notion that there is meaning in existence. He is saying that when all is said and done and gone, our universe doesn't matter. After all, it will destroy and create itself into eternity. It does not have a purpose, like a machine. Humans seek honour in the universe and we find honour in spite of any purposive inclusion. So tricking ourselves is easy as we have become conceited into believing that we are the purposes of the universe. All the power in the universe working toward producing our species of mammals! Yet let us be reasonable. Nietzsche calls the organic an 'exception of exceptions', where matter itself is an exception. We are not the secret aim, but a byproduct of unusual circumstances. It is an error to assume that all of the space behaves in the manner of that which immediately surrounds us. We cannot be sure of this uniformity. Nietzsche uses our surrounding stars as an example. He asserts that stars may very well exist whose orbits are not at all what we suppose? ‘Let us beware of attributing it to heartlessness and unreason and their opposites’. There is no intent, as there is no such accident, because this requires a purpose. All these things are disguises man has given the universe. They are false, but why should we beware? Nietzsche emphasizes our weakness as animals. We are the only animals that live against our natural inclinations. By suppressing our instincts, we become less and less equipped to exist as part of nature. If we continue living against our surroundings, we will be removed, not out of God's anger, but out of necessity.

Nietzsche reminds us that the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos. The only structure responsible for the necessity that reigns in nature is the will to power. The will to power begins in chaos. We find it unpleasant to think of our lives in these terms, because, stronger than our urge to deify nature is usually our urge to deify ourselves. We are merely living things. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.' There is no opposition, only will to power. The living and the dead are both made of the same basic materials. The difference is that when something is alive, its molecules reproduce. Again, Nietzsche focuses on the exceptions.

When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-veneration of nature? When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity through a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

Nietzsche divides human beings according to their creative power. The higher, creative humans see and hear more than the lower, who concern themselves with matters of man. This is a pattern found throughout nature: the higher animals experience more. In humans, the higher become at once happier and unhappier, because they are feeling more. Nietzsche calls these people the ‘poets’ who are creating the lives on stage, while the non-creative are exasperated ‘actors’. The actors could be better understood as spectators of the poets' performance. Poets’ thinks and feels harmoniously, matched with time; he is able continually to fashion something that did not previously exist. He created the entire world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations' studied by the actor. In our society, the actor is called practical, when it is the poet who is responsible for any value we place. By this, Nietzsche means that, since nothing has any meaning or value by nature, the poets are responsible because they are the ones who produce beauty. They are responsible for everything in the world that concerns man. They fail to recognize this, however, and remain unaware of their best power. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.

Our poets produce art. Art is the expression of perfect beauty that does not occur naturally. Human hands have given and conceived it by human minds; it is human nature. We are separate from the rest of the animal kingdom in our deviation from nature. Our instincts led us to delight in art as it distinguished itself and its creators as supernatural. We must wonder at nature becoming bored with ourselves, to create something better and, perhaps, slightly as perfect than it can become. What does nature know of perfection? It is the will to power, but a facet only exhibited in humans. All the same, in that it seems that art is meant to be as far removed from everything as naturally possible. Nietzsche uses the Greeks as an example of this pure art. They did not want fear and pity. To prevent these human emotions from interfering in the presentation of a writer's work, the Greeks would confine actors to narrow stages and restrict their facial expressions. The object was beautiful speech, with the presentation only meant to do the words justice, not to distract with dramatic interpretation. A more modern example is the opera. Nietzsche points out the insignificance of the words versus the music. What is the loss in not understanding an opera singer? In the present, art has degenerated so that its purpose is often to remind us of our humanity, much less to express that which is perfect. We listen for words that shackle us to the land in a medium that can elevate us above the rest. Art gives human life reason, purpose, and all the things we have attributed from God, but Art is true. It is the only meaning in life, because it is unnatural.

An examining consideration as arranged of human autonomy has of itself the designed particularity of interests, in that for Nietzsche conveys the predisposition for which it finds the preservation of the species. It is the oldest and strongest of our instincts, and it is the essence of the herd. Why should we care about the survival of our race? It is not in our interest as individuals. Yet we cannot avoid it. Nietzsche points out that even the most harmful men aid preservation by instilling instincts in the rest of us that a necessary for our survival. In that way they are largely responsible for it, but according to Nietzsche, we are no longer capable of ‘living badly’. That is, living in a way that goes against preservation of the human race: 'Above all, perish', you will contribute to humanity.

Nietzsche reflected back to the contributions achieved through the afforded endeavours attributively generated of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and, by comparison and consistence in their according attitude with their sense of nature. The seventeenth century was a time when humans lived closer to their instincts. An artist of that time would attempt to capture all that he could in art, removing himself as much as possible. In the eighteenth century, Nietzsche says that artists took the focus away from nature and put it on themselves. Art became social propaganda. It became more human. We are missing ‘the hatred of the lack of a sense of nature' that was present in the seventeenth century. Nietzsche writes of the nineteenth century with hope. He says people have become more concrete, more fearless. They are putting the 'health of the body ahead of the health of the soul'. It would appear that they are making a return to nature, except that if they reach it, it will be for the first time.

‘There has never yet been of a foremost advance in natural humanity. That is a humanity living according to their nature. Nietzsche stresses that we have become far too unnatural in our social and technical evolution. Humans have tried to exist above nature, condemning their own world (in fact, themselves) as if they were the only ones alive by the grace of God. This is an obvious contradiction for Nietzsche. He believes first that, since human beings share the same relationship with nature as any other animal, we ought to live according to our instincts. We ought to do what comes naturally to us that which most reflects the will to power. He uses two examples of natural human behaviour (human instinct) to clarify. The first example is the search for knowledge, which is naturally occurring in all humans, whether they are conscious of it or not. The second is the way we perceive our rights in society. This is an example of humans living according to necessity. We act according to that which can be enforced. Punishment is our only deterrent. In that respect, we live naturally, but that is in resignation that we meet a superficial nature. If we could live in accord with that which governs our fellow creatures, we would discover our true selves, and realize our full potential as artists.

Nietzsche regards the evolution of human nature as a journey from the age of morality into the age of self consciousness, or the age of ridicule. He saw humanity of his time still living according to teachers of remorse, their so-called ‘heroes.’ These men inspired our faith in life, and our fear of death. They gave us false reasons for our existence, disguising it with the invention of a ‘teacher of the purpose of existence’. Nietzsche believes that the idea of God came about because it distracted people from their insignificance. What does one person count for in relation to the whole of society? Nothing, the preservation of the species is all that matter. We are mammals like any other. If by force or some orderly enforcement was to gain power and leadership for themselves, the ‘heroes’ taught us that we were significant in the eyes of God. They taught us to take ourselves seriously; that life is worth living because of this 'teacher of purpose'. We cling to this safety blanket that protects us from seeing us at eye level with the rest of the natural world because we cannot handle the true nature of the human race as a herd.

Nietzsche predicts that humans will evolve to the point where they can comprehend the true nature of their species. This realization brings ridicule to our lives. Nothing has been meaning that it is all random functioning at the hands of the will to power. We can no longer be solemn in our work, for how are we to take ourselves seriously when we have given up our blanket? It seems that we had lost our direction to the madness of nature and reason. We must remember that unreason is also essential for the preservation of the species.

In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations the Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology who asserts attention by unitizing contingently prescribed studies as a curriculum can quickly bind and serve as for his time must be accredited of it, embracing willfully a ‘new system for psychology?

In fact, several authors view many expressions as voiced in the aspects of Nietzsche’s work, for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb, as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by many authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short, beautiful verse. Surely, while being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, retired professors of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, self conscious, self analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness with his morbidity and self-destructiveness into the scope of existence.

Further, in his many writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanism, repression, suppression, overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between individuals etc., As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means to alleviate human crises and despair.

These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based). Nietzsche’s has influenced and affected methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on ideas that are both displayed in it and developed by it -ideas such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.

Nonetheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology are not in passing over, but collectively strict and well-set in determining each general standard to assailing mortality. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, in general, and psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential, humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud. Nietzsche is profound and significant, for the actual psychotherapeutic treatment. The reason as for this difference lie in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, and in the variation in the intellectual soil, that nourished and nurtured the two giant savants' views, doctrines (that is, the scholarly academic savants' philosophical and historical roots and influences) and the manners according to which they have been devised and designed.

Before anything else, the question of Nietzsche's historical critique, as might that we will recall of how one featuring narrative has been drawn from the texts, that we had read earlier, was a rapidly developing interest in and used for the enormously powerful historical criticism developed by Enlightenment thinkers. It is a way of undermining the authority of traditional power structures and the fundamental beliefs that sustain them.

We saw, for example, how in Descartes's Discourse on Method, Descartes offers a hypothetical historical narrative to undermine the authority of the Aristotelians and a faith in an eternal unchanging natural order. Then, we discussed how in the Discourse on Inequality, based on an imaginative reconstruction of the history of human society, Rousseau, following Descartes's lead but extending it to other areas (and much more aggressively), can encourage in the mind of the reader the view that evil in life is the product of social injustice (rather than, say, the result of Original Sin or the lack of virtue in the lower orders). We have in addition of reading Kant, Marx, and Darwin how a historical understanding applied to particular phenomena undercut traditional notions of eternal truths enshrined in any particular beliefs (whether in species, in religious values, or in final purposes).

Nonetheless, this is a crucial point, the Enlightenment thinker, particularly Kant and Rousseau and Marx, do not allow history to undermine all sources of meaning; For them, beyond its unanswerable power to dissolve traditional authority, history holds out the promise of a new grounding for rational meaning, in the growing power of human societies to become rational, to, and in one word, progress. Thus, history, beyond revealing the inadequacies of many traditional power structures and sources of meaning, had also become the best hope and proof for a firm faith in a new eternal order: The faith in progressive reform or revolution. This, too, is clearly something Wollstonecraft pins her hopes on (although, as we saw, how radical her emplacements continue as of a matter to debate).

On this point, as we also saw, Darwin, at least in the Origin of Species, is ambiguous -almost as if, knowing he is on very slippery ground, he doesn't want his readers to recognize the full metaphysical and epistemological implications of his theory of the history of life. Because of this probably deliberate ambiguities that we variously interpreted Darwin as offering either a "progressive" view of evolution, something that we could adapt to the Enlightenment's faith in rational progress or, alternatively, as presenting a contingent view of the history of life, a story without progress or final goal or overall purposes.

Well, in Nietzsche (as in the view of Darwin) there is no such ambiguity. Darwin made his theory public for the first time in a paper delivered to the Linnean Society in 1858. The paper begins, “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external natures.” In the Origins of Species, Darwin is more specific about the character of this war, “There must be in every species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” All these assumptions are apparent in Darwin’s definition of natural selection: If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed, if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of an increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this cannot be disputed, as then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their condition of life . . . , this will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest is so called the Natural Selection.

Similarly, clusters of distributed brain areas undertake individual linguistic symbols and are not produced in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in dedicated regions. Nevertheless, the symbolic and referential relationship between words is generated through a convergence of neural codes from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations of simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require an active role from other regions. The symbol meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between strings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing more about, the neuronal processes applied therein. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

With that, let us include two aspects of biological reality, its more complex order in biological reality may be associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the parts, and the entire biosphere is a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts ( the attributive view that all organisms (*parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (*whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole). If this is the case, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complex systems marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense pre-ordained or predestined by natural process. Nonetheless, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.

Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language systems that are particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm as separately distinct from the material realm. It was, moreover the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his dualism to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.

Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and difference and is governed by a principle of organization determining the inter-relationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts that make up the whole, although the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, “is nothing really by itself. It is the way the parts are organized, and not another constituent additional to those that make up the totality.”

In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be “internal or immanent” in the parts, as opposed to a more spurious whole in which parts appear to announce of wholeness due to relationships that are external to the parts. The collection of parts that would allegedly make up the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts constitute a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and by that adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relation between parts and whole in modern biology.

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that shows progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness shows self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.

However, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe is a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, if one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific description of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.

This understanding can, of course, be achieved by those who have no interest in ontology and/or feel that the vision of physical reality showed in modern physical theory has nothing to do with ontology. Belief in ontology is not required to understand the implications of modern physical theories or to use this understanding to conceive of better ways to coordinate human experience in the interest of survival. It is also possible that threats to this survival could be eliminated based on a pragmatic acceptance of the actual conditions and terms for sustaining and protecting human life.

Religious thinkers can enter this dialogue knowing that metaphysical question’s no longer lie within the province of science and that science cannot in principle dismiss or challenge belief in spiritual reality. Nevertheless, if these thinkers elect to challenge the truths of science within its own domain, they must either withdraw from the dialogue or engage science on its own terms. Applying metaphysics where there is no metaphysics, or attempting to rewrite or rework scientific truths and/or facts in proving metaphysical assumptions, merely displays a profound misunderstanding of science and an apparent unwillingness to recognize its success. Yet it is also true that the study of science can indirectly serve to reinforce belief in profoundly religious truths while not claiming to legislate the ultimate character of these truths.

For Nietzsche, the ironies of history go all the way down and disfranchise all claims to the Truth, as Nietzsche is the first major thinker to take seriously the full implications of the historical critique and to apply it to all of a culture's most cherished possessions: It’s science, religion, morality, politics, faith in progress, science, language, in short, everything.

Every schoolchild learns eventually that Nietzsche was the author of the shocking slogan, "God is dead." However, what makes that statements possible are another claim, even more shocking in its implications: "Only that which has no history can be defined" (Genealogy of Morals). Since Nietzsche was the heir to seventy-five years of German historical scholarship, he knew that there was no such thing as something that has no history. Darwin had, as Dewey points out that essay we examined, effectively shown that searching for a true definition of a species is not only futile but unnecessary (since the definition of a species is something temporary, something that changes over time, without any permanent lasting and stable reality). Nietzsche dedicates his philosophical work to doing the same for all cultural values.

Reflecting it for a moment on the full implications of this claim is important. You will remember (no doubt) how in Liberal Studies we started our study of moral philosophy with the Memo, the diabetic exchange with which explores the question "What is virtue?" That takes a firm withstanding until we can settle that of the issue with a definition that eludes all cultural qualification. What virtue is, that we cannot effectively deal with morality, accept through divine dispensation, unexamined reliance on traditions, skepticism, or relativism (the position of Thrasymachus). The full exploration of what dealing with that question of definition might require takes’ place in the Republic.

Many texts we read subsequently took up Plato's challenge, seeking to discover, through reason, a permanent basis for understanding knowledge claims and moral values. No matter what the method, as Nietzsche points out in his first section, the belief was always that grounding knowledge and morality in truth was possible and valuable, that the activity of seeking to ground morality was conducive to a fuller good life, individually and communally.

To use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, we can say that previous systems of thought had sought to provide a true transcript of the book of nature. They made claims about the authority of one true text. Nietzsche insists repeatedly that there be no single canonical text; There are only interpretations. So, there is no appeal to some definitive version of Truth (whether we search in philosophy, religion, or science). Thus the Socratic quest for some way to tie morality down to the ground, so that it does not fly away, is (and has always been) futile, although the long history of attempts to do so has disciplined the European mind so that we, or a few of us, are ready to move into dangerous new territory where we can situate the most basic assumptions about the need for conventional morality to the test and move on "beyond good and evil," that is, to a place where we do not take the universalizing concerns and claims of traditional morality seriously.

Nietzsche begins his critique here by challenging that fundamental assumption: Who says that seeking the truth is better for human beings? How do we know an untruth is not better? What is truth anyway? In doing so, he challenges the sense of purpose basic to the traditional philosophical endeavour. Philosophers, he points out early, may be proud of the way they begin by challenging and doubting received ideas. However, they never challenge or doubt the key notion they all start with, namely, that there is such a thing as the Truth and that it is something valuable for human beings (surely much more valuable than its opposite).

In other words, just as the development of the new science had gradually and for many painfully and rudely emptied nature of any certainty about a final purpose, about the possibilities for ever agreeing of the ultimate value of scientific knowledge, so Nietzsche is, with the aid of new historical science (and the proto-science of psychology) emptying all sources of cultural certainty of their traditional purposiveness and claims to permanent truth, and therefore of their value, as we traditionally understood that of the term. There is thus no antagonism between good and evil, since all versions of equal are equally fictive (although some may be more useful for the purposes of living than others).

At this lodging within space and time, I really do not want to analyse the various ways Nietzsche deals with this question. Nevertheless, I do want to insist upon the devastating nature of his historical critique on all previous systems that have claimed to ground knowledge and morality on a clearly defined truth of things. For Nietzsche's genius rests not only on his adopting the historical critique and applying to new areas but much more on his astonishing perspicuity in seeing just how extensive and flexible the historical method might be.

For example, Nietzsche, like some of those before him, insists that value systems are culturally determined they arise, he insists, as often as not form or in reaction to conventional folk wisdom. Yet to this he adds something that to us, after Freud, may be well accepted, but in Nietzsche's hands become something as shocking: Understanding of a system of value is, he claims, requires us more than anything else to see it as the product of a particular individual's psychological history, a uniquely personal confession. Relationship to something called the "Truth" has nothing to do with the "meaning" of a moral system; as an alternative we seek its coherence in the psychology of the philosopher who produced it.

Gradually, in having grown into a greater clarity of what every great philosophy has endearingly become, as staying in the main theme of personal confessions, under which a kind of involuntary and an unconscious memoir and largely that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy formed the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

A concentration has here unmasked claims to “truth” upon the history of the life of the person proposing the particular "truth" this time. Systems offering us a route to the Truth are simply psychologically produced fictions that serve the deep (often unconscious) purposes of the individual proposing them. Therefore they are what Nietzsche calls "foreground" truths. They do not penetrate into the deep reality of nature, and, yet, to fail to see this is to lack "perspective."

Even more devastating is Nietzsche's extension of the historical critique to language itself. Since philosophical systems deliver themselves to us in language, that language shapes them and by the history of that language. Our Western preoccupation with the inner self for which perceivable determinates, wills, and so forth, Nietzsche can place a value on as, in large part, the product of grammar, the result of a language that builds its statements around a subject and a predicate. Without that historical accident, Nietzsche affirms, we would not have committed an error into mistaking for the truth something that is a by-product of our particular culturally determined language system.

He makes the point, for example, that our faith in consciousness is just an accident. If instead of saying "I think," we were to say "Thinking is going on in my body," then we would not be tempted to give the "I," some independent existence (e.g., in the mind) and make large claims about the ego or the inner self. The reason we do search for such an entity stem from the accidental construction of our language, which encourages us to use a subject (the personal pronoun) and a verb. The same false confidence in language also makes it easy for us to think that we know clearly what key things like "thinking" and "willing" are; Whereas, if we were to engage in even a little reflection, we would quickly realize that the inner processes neatly summed up by these apparently clear terms is anything but clear. His emphasis on the importance of psychology as queen of the sciences underscores his sense of how we need to understand more fully just how complex these activities are, particularly the emotional appetites, before we talk about them so simplistically, the philosophers that concurrently have most recently done.

This remarkable insight enables Nietzsche, for example, at one blow and with cutting contempt devastatingly to dismiss as "trivial" the system Descartes had set up so carefully in the Meditations. Descartes's triviality consists in failing to recognize how the language he imprisons, shapes his philosophical system as an educated European, using and by his facile treatment of what thinking is in the first place. The famous Cartesian dualism is not a central philosophical problem but an accidental by-product of grammar designed to serve Descartes' own particular psychological needs. Similarly Kant's discovery of "new faculties" Nietzsche derides as just a trick of language -a way of providing what looks like an explanation and is, in fact, as ridiculous as the old notions about medicines putting people to sleep because they have the sleeping virtue.

It should be clear from examples like this (and the others throughout the text) that there is very little capability of surviving Nietzsche's onslaught, for what are there to which we can points to which did not have a history or deliver itself to us in a historically developing system of language? After all, our scientific enquiries in all areas of human experience teach us that nothing is ever, for everything is always becoming.

We might be tempted, as many have been, to point to the new natural science as a counter-instance that typifies the dulling of natural science of a progressive realization of the truth of the world, or at least a closer and closer approximation to that truth? In fact, it is interesting to think about just how closely Kuhn and Nietzsche might be linked in their views about the relationship between science and the truth of things or to what extent modern science might not provide the most promising refutation of Nietzsche's assertion that there is no privileged access to a final truth of things (a hotly disputed topic in the last decade or more). It is say here that for Nietzsche science is just another "foreground" way of interpreting nature. It has no privileged access to the Truth, although he does concede that, compared with other beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on sense experience and therefore is more useful for modern times.

There is one important point to stress in this review of the critical power of Nietzsche's project. Noting that Nietzsche is not calling us to a task for having beliefs is essential. We have to have beliefs. Human life must be the affirmation of values; Otherwise, it is not life. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is centrally concerned to mock us for believing that our belief systems are True, are fixed, are somehow eternally right by a grounded standard of knowledge. Human life, in its highest forms, must be lived in the full acceptance that the values we create for ourselves are fictions. We, or the best of us, have to have the courage to face the fact that there is no "Truth" upon which to ground anything in which we believe; we must in the full view of that harsh insight, but affirm ourselves with joy. The Truth is not accessible to our attempts at discovery; What thinking human beings characteristically do, in their pursuit of the Truth, is creating their own truths.

Now, this last point, like the others, has profound implications for how we think of ourselves, for our conception of the human self. Because human individuals, like human cultures, also have a history. Each of us has a personal history, and thus we ourselves cannot be defined; we, too, are in a constant process of becoming, of transcending the person we have been into something new. We may like to think of ourselves as defined by some essential rational quality, but in fact we are not. In stressing this, of course, Nietzsche links himself with certain strains of Romanticism, especially (from the point of view of our curriculum) with William Blake and, for those who took the American Adam seminar, with Emerson and Thoreau.

This tradition of Romanticism holds up a view of life that is radically individualistic, self-created, self-generated. "I must create my own system or become enslaved by another man's" Blake wrote. It is also thoroughly aristocratic, with little room for traditional altruism, charity, or egalitarianism. Our lives to realize their highest potential should be lived in solitude from others, except perhaps those few we recognize as kindred souls, and our life's efforts must be a spiritually demanding but joyful affirmation of the process by which we maintain the vital development of our imaginative conceptions of ourselves.

Contrasting this view of the self as a constantly developing entity might be appropriate here, without essential permanence, with Marx's view. Marx, too, insists on the process of transformation of the self and ideas of the self, but for him, as we discussed, the material forces control the transformation of production, and these in turn are driven by the logic of history. It is not something that the individual takes charge of by an act of individual will, because individual consciousness, like everything else, emerges from and is dependent upon the particular historical and material circumstances, the stage in the development of production, of the social environment in which the individual finds himself or herself.

Nietzsche, like Marx, and unlike later Existentialists, de Beauvoir, for example, recognizes that the individual inherits particular things from the historical moment of the culture (e.g., the prevailing ideas and, particularly, the language and ruling metaphors). Thus, for Nietzsche the individual is not totally free of all context. However, the appropriate response to this is not, as in Marx, the development of class consciousness, a solidarity with other citizens and an imperative to help history along by committing oneself to the class war alongside other proletarians, but in the best and brightest spirits, a call for a heightened sense of an individuality, of one's radical separation from the herd, of one's final responsibility to one's own most fecund creativity.

Because Nietzsche and the earlier Romantics are not simply saying, we should do what we like is vital. They all have a sense that self-creation of the sort they recommend requires immense spiritual and emotional discipline -the discipline of the artist shaping his most important original creation following the stringent demands of his creative imagination. These demands may not be rational, but they are not permissively relativistic in that 1960's sense ("If it feels good, do it"). Permissiveness may have often been attributed to this Romantic tradition, a sort of 1960's “Boogie til you drop" ethic, but that is not what any of them had in mind. For Nietzsche that would simply be a herd response to a popularized and bastardized version of a much higher call to a solitary life lived with the most intense but personal joy, suffering, insight, courage, and imaginative discipline.

This aspect of Nietzsche's thought represents the fullest nineteenth-century European affirmation of a Romantic vision of the self as radically individualistic (at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marx's views of the self as socially and economically determined). It has had, as I hope to mention briefly next week, a profound and lasting effect in the twentieth century as we become ever more uncertain about coherent social identities and thus increasingly inclined to look for some personal way to take full charge of our own identities without answering to anyone but ourselves.

Much of the energy and much of the humour in Nietzsche's prose comes from the urgency with which he sees such creative self-affirmation as essential if the human species is not going to continue to degenerate. For Nietzsche, human beings are, primarily, biological creatures with certain instinctual drives. The best forms of humanity are those of whom most excellently express the most important of these biological drives, the "will to power," by which he means the individual will to assume of oneself and create what he or she needs, to live most fully. Such a "will to power" is beyond morality, because it does not answer to anyone's system of what makes up good and bad conduct. The best and strongest human beings are those of whom create a better quality in values for themselves, live by them, and refuse to acknowledge their common links with anyone else, other than other strong people who do the same and are thus their peers.

His surveys of world history have convinced Nietzsche that the development of systems has turned this basic human drive against human beings of morality favouring the weak, the suffering, the sick, the criminal, and the incompetent (all of whom he lumps together in that famous phrase "the herd"). He salutes the genius of those who could accomplish this feat (especially the Jews and Christians), which he sees as the revenge of the slaves against their natural masters. From this century -long acts of revenge, human beings are now filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, jealousy, and mediocrity, a condition alleviated, if at all, by dreams of being helpful to others and of an ever-expanding democracy, an agenda powerfully served by modern science (which serves to bring everything and everyone down to the same level). Fortunately, however, this ordeal has trained our minds splendidly, so that the best and brightest (the new philosophers, the free spirits) can move beyond the traditional boundaries of morality, that is, "beyond good and evil" (his favourite metaphor for this condition is the tensely arched bow ready to shoot off an arrow).

Stressing it is important, as I mentioned above, that Nietzsche does not believe that becoming such a "philosopher of the future" is easy or for everyone. It is, by contrast, an extraordinarily demanding call, and those few capable of responding to it might have to live solitary lives without recognition of any sort. He is demanding an intense spiritual and intellectual discipline that will enable the new spirit to move into territory no philosopher has ever roamed before, a displacing medium where there are no comfortable moral resting places and where the individual will probably (almost unquestionably) has to pursue of a profoundly lonely and perhaps dangerous existence (so the importance of another favourite metaphor of his, the mask). Nevertheless, this is the only way we can counter the increasing degeneration of European man into a practical, democratic, technocratic, altruistic herd animal.

By way of a further introduction to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, it would only offer an extended analogy, something that emerged from a seminar discussion, in that, I apologize that the opening parts of this paper may be familiar to some. Still, I hope quickly to extend some remarks into directions that have not yet been explore.

Before placing the analogy on the table, however, I wish to issue a caveat. Analogies may really help to clarify, but they can also influence us by some unduly persuasive influences of misleading proportions. I hope that the analogy I offer will provide such clarity, but not at the price of oversimplifying. So, as you listen to this analogy, you need to address the questions: To what extent does this analogy not hold? To what extent does it reduce the complexity of what Nietzsche is saying into a simpler form?

The analogy I want to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which several different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness.

These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups: French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or what possesses you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities.

The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; Some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. They might combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues.

When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically, what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many participants in anyone game has been aggressively convinced that their game is the "true" game, which it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent much time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Therefore, in addition anyone game itself, within the group pursuing it there has always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on.

Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship that shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin that can be historically found.

Rule books are written in languages that have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: The games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive game’s people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveals something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore "true" in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it was, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness.

In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book; He points out that nature is "wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain simultaneously: Imagine indifference itself as a power -how could you live according to this indifference. Living-is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature.” Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such rule books are mere "foreground" pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule manuals often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture, thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages that insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement.

So how do we know what we have is the truth? Why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true, but why? Might they not be better if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, deal with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, "only that which has no history can be defined," they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.

Furthermore these historical changes and developments occur accidentally, for contingent reasons, and have nothing to do with the games, or anyone game, shaping itself according to any ultimate game or any given rule book of games given by the wilderness, which is indifferent to what is going on. There is no basis for the belief that, if we look at the history of the development of these games, we discover some progressive evolution of games toward some higher type. We may be able, like Darwin, to trace historical genealogies, to construct a narrative, but that narrative does not reveal any clear direction or any final goal or any progressive development. The genealogy of games suggests that history be a record of contingent change. The assertion that there is such a thing as progress is simply another game, another rule added by inventive minds (who need to believe in progress); it bears no relationship to nature beyond the sports complex.

While one is playing on a team, one follows the rules and thus has a sense of what form right and wrong or good and evil conduct in the game. All those carrying out the same endeavour share this awareness. To pick up the ball in soccer is evil (unless you are the goalie), and to punt the ball while running in American football is permissible but stupid; in Australian football both actions are essential and right. In other words, different cultural communities have different standards of right and wrong conduct. The artificial inventions have determined these called rule books, one for each game. These rule books have developed the rules historically; Thus, they have no permanent status and no claim to privileged access.

Now, at this point you might be thinking about the other occasion in which I introduced a game analogy, namely, in the discussions of Aristotle's Ethics. For Aristotle also acknowledges that different political systems have different rules of conduct. Still, Aristotle believes that an examination of different political communities will enable one to derive certain principles common to them all, bottom-up generalizations that will then provide the basis for reliable rational judgment on which game is being played better, on what was good play in any particular game, on whether or not a particular game is being conducted well or not.

In other words, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.

Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.

If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access at all to that text. What we do have accessed to conflicting interpretations, none of them based on privileged access to a "true" text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.

Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.

Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer. Without that the game could not continue in its traditional way. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness itself.

Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as "bad" those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct oneself. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.

However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.

For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.

So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the PA system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.

This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he's moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.

For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.

Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some "truth."

Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds -a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.

What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of "help your neighbour," now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).

The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.

First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.

Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called "happiness." Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon.

This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.

There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.

For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our "will to power." So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For we are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.

So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.

The nihilists have discovered half this insight, but, because they are not capable of living the full awareness, they are very limited human beings.

The third group of people, that small minority that includes Nietzsche himself, is those who accept the game’s metaphor, see the fictive nature of all systems of knowledge and morality, and accept the challenge that to be most fully human is to create a new game, to live a life governed by rules imposed by the dictates of one's own creative nature. To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.

This call to live the self-created life, affirming oneself in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a self-generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.

Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules I devise and the language I frame them in will ordinarily owe a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although I am changing the rules for my game, my starting point, or the rules I have available to change, are given to me by my moment in history. So in moving forward, in creating something that will transcend the past, I am using the materials of the past. Existing games are the materials out of which I fashion my new game.

Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.

The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.

Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.

Now, I have put this analogy on the table to help clarify some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.

So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.

Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of "truth" of the sort we had in earlier centuries, or, as we will see in the poetry of Eliot, lamenting the collapse of traditional systems of value. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful self-affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.

After this rapid and, I hope, useful construction and description of an analogy, as only one final point that remains: So how have we responded and are we still responding to all of this? What of an impact has this powerful challenge to our most confident traditions had? Well, there is not time here to trace the complex influence of Nietzsche's thought in a wide range of areas. That influence has been immense and continues still. However, I would like to sketch a few points about what may be happening right now.

Here I must stress that I am offering a personal review, which an expertise does not inform in this question. Still, any general reading in modern studies of culture suggests that responses to Nietzsche are important and diverse. His stock has been very bullish for the past two decades, at least.

One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to self-create our own lives, to come up with new self-descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.

Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.

Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.

A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.

To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudo-scientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.

Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history; Renouncing that simply of diverting intellectuals away from social injustice. No wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists allied and the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.

Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.

Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and so on. An important recent example such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.

Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while at the same time recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constant metaphorical self-definition.

To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy I started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the PA system in a way no to which one bothered to attend; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.

You may recall how, in Book X of the Republic, Plato talks about the "ancient war between poetry and philosophy." What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)

Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets itself up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets itself up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.

Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers is mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know. Therefore, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: "Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry." Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.

One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.

Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own "confession" of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.

If we accept this characterization of the "ancient war" between two different uses of language, then we might want to ask ourselves why they cannot be reconciled. Why must there be a war? This has, in part, to do with the sorts of questions one wants to ask about the nature of things and about the sorts of answers that the enquiring mind requires. For traditionally there have been some important differences between the language of mathematics or geometry or a vocabulary that seeks to approximate the denotative clarity of these disciplines and the language of poetry. The central difference I would like to focus on is the matter of ambiguity.

The terminological convictions of mathematics and especially of Euclidean geometry, are characterized, above all, by denotative clarity and of precise definitions, clear axioms, firm logical links between statements all of which are designed to produce a rationally coherent structure that will compel agreement among those who take the time to work their way through the system. The intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of Euclid, I would maintain, arise, in large part, from this. People who want this sort of clarity in their understanding of the world will naturally be drawn to define as acceptable questions and answers which frame themselves in a language that seeks this sort of clarity.

Poetical language, by contrast, is inherently ironic, ambiguous, elusive. When I move from clear definition to metaphor, that is, to a comparison, or to a narrative that requires interpretation (like the Book of Exodus, for example, or the Iliad) then my statement requires interpretation, an understanding that an appeal to exact definitions and clear rules of logic cannot quickly satisfy. To agree about metaphor requires explanation and persuasion of a sort different from what is required to get people to accept the truths of Euclidean geometry.

For example, if I have trouble with the statement "The interior angles of a triangle add up to two right angles," I can find exact definitions of all the terms, I can review the step-by-step logical process that leads from self-evident first principles to this statement, and I then understand exactly what this means. I am rationally compelled to agree, provided the initial assumptions and the logical adequacy of the process do not disturb me. I am able to explain the claim to someone else, so that he or she arrives at the same understanding of the original statement about the sum of the interior angles (the compelling logic of this form of language is, of course, the point of the central section of Plato's Memo, Socrates's education of Memo's slave in the Pythagorean Theorem)

Nonetheless, a claim like "My love is like a red, red rose" is of a different order. I can check the dictionary definitions of all the words, but that by itself will not be enough. How do I deal with the comparison? I can go out and check whether my love has thorns on her legs or her hair falls off after a few days standing in water, but that is not going to offer much help, because obviously I am not meant to interpret this statement literally: a comparison, a metaphor is involved. An understanding of the statement requires that I interpret the comparison: What is the range of association summoned up by the metaphor that compares my beloved or my feelings for my beloved to a common flower?

On this point, if we sit discussing the matter, we are likely to disagree or at least fail to reach the same common rational understanding that we derived from our study of the first statement concerning the interior angles of the triangle. If we want to agree on the metaphor, then we are going to have to persuade each other, and even then our separate understandings may not be congruent.

We have had direct experience of this in Liberal Studies. When we discussed Euclid, we had nothing to argue about. The discussions focussed on whether or not everyone understood the logical steps involved, the definitions and axioms, and possible alternative logical methods. Nevertheless, no one offered seriously as an interpretative opinion that the interior angles of a triangle might add up to three right angles or one and a half right angle. If someone had claimed that, then we would have maintained that he or she had failed in some fundamental way to follow the steps in the proofs. By contrast, when we discussed, say, King Lear or the Tempest or Jane Eyre or Red and Black, we spent most of our time considering alternative interpretations of particular episodes, and we did not reach any precisely defined shared conclusion. Nor could be that we, if we spent the entire four semesters debating the issue?

It looks of no doubt a vast oversimplification to present the issue of language solely about these two diametrically opposed ways, but for the sake of discussion it is a useful starting point. We might go on to observe that, again to make a vast oversimplification, people tend to prefer one use of language over another: Some like their verbal understandings of things clear, precise, logically sound, so that there is the possibility of a universally recognized meaning with minimum ambiguity, or as close as we can get to such a goal. Others prefer the ambiguity and emotional richness of metaphor, although (or because) the price of such a language is an inherent irony, a multiplicity of meanings, the suggestion of no simple, shared, precise, final meaning.

The question of the language appropriate to a proper understanding of things is particularly important for a comprehension of the history of Christianity, too, because, as we all know, Christianity takes as its central text a book full of poetry, narrative, imagery. Faith in what this book "means" or what it "reveals" about the nature of the divinity is a central part of being a Christian. Many, urgent and contumacious disputes in the history of Christianity have arisen out of the metaphorical nature of this holy text: Since metaphors and metaphorical narratives are inherently ambiguous, they need interpretation, whose interpretations are decisive in any disagreement becomes a vital concern.

Controlling the text and maintaining the authority to determine interpretations of the holy text were always a central imperative of the medieval Catholic Church, which recognized very clearly and correctly that to give people (even parish priests) access to the Bible would result in interpretative anarchy. So, the Catholic Church's strict control of the book, its refusal to distribute it widely or to translate it into the common language of the people, and its insistence that the basis for popular sermons should be, not the Bible itself, but the clear and unambiguous official interpretations condoned by the Vatican.

The Church's suspicion of the anarchy that would follow upon any general access to the Bible revealed itself as correct once Luther's Reformation made the holy text generally available in translation. Suddenly, the enforced interpretative consensus dissolved, and scores of competing sects arose, each claiming a correct version of the truth derived through an interpretation of the metaphorical constructions in the Bible. An extreme (but not altogether uncommon) example was the war between the followers of Zwingli and the followers of Muntzer, two Protestant leaders, over whether the communion wafer was the body of Christ or symbolized the body of Christ and over the interpretation of baptism. Many thousands died in the quarrel over these interpretative questions. Said Zwingli to Muntzer,

"I will be blunt, sir.

I do not like your version. Of total immersion.

And since God's on my side

And I am on the dry side

over which you should swing. To me and Jehovah."

Cried Muntzer "It is schism

Is infant baptism?

Since I have had a sign, sir

That God's will is mine, sir,

Let all men agree

With Jehovah and me. Or go to hell singly”

Said Muntzer to Zwingli.

And each drew his sword. On the side of the Lord.Today such issues that involve killing others over the ontological status of a biscuit or bathwater may seem ridiculous, but the issue is not. An authority that derives from a poetical metaphorical text must rest, not on that text, but on a particular interpretation of it. Whoever is the spokesperson for the official interpretation has official power. Thus, from this point of view, one can interpret the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quarrelsome interpretation run amok.

Surely, the conclusion of the religious wars brought with it a demand to clean up language, to be wary of metaphors and especially of writing that was highly metaphorical, and to place our verbal understandings of the world and ourselves on a more rationally clear basis in a language more appropriate to such a requirement.

It is no accident that the period following the religious wars (the mid-seventeenth century) marks the beginning of an interest in dictionaries (whose major goal is to promote accuracy of shared denoted meanings), a revival of interest in Euclidean geometry, developing distrust of political and philosophical arguments based upon scripture, a rising criticism of extravagant rhetorical styles (like those of Shakespeare or John Donne or "enthusiastic" preachers), the beginning of a concerted attempt to understand moral and judicial questions mathematically, and a rising demand for a language as empty of ambiguous metaphor as possible.

We witness this in several writers, above all in Hobbes. As we discussed, Hobbes' major concern in Leviathan is to recommend practices that will minimize a return to the civil chaos of the religious wars and the English Civil War. Hobbes is centrally concerned about language. Over half of Leviathan is concerned with religion, above all with the question of interpretation of scripture. For Hobbes is deeply suspicious of literary interpretation and has a clear preference for the language of geometry, the argumentative style of Euclid -not necessarily because that language provides a true description of the nature of the world (although many people claimed and still claim that it does) but only that a little deductive clarity-based on clear definitions and fundamental principles of deductive logic -can win wide agreement, can, that is, promote social harmony essential to political peace and "commodious living."

The reason for this preference in Hobbes seems clear enough. Metaphorical language breeds arguments over interpretations; Such arguments breed civil quarrels, civil quarrels lead to a break down in public order and foster a return to a state of nature. A different language, one based on the precision of geometry, can foster agreement, because we all can occupy the same understanding if definitions are exact and the correct logic.

One attraction of the new science (although there was considerable argument about this) was that it offered an understanding of the world delivered in the most unambiguous way, in the language of mathematics rather than of scripture. Newton's equations, for those who could follow the mathematics, did not promote the sorts of arguments that arose from, say, the text about Ezekiel making the sun stands still or Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea or God's creating the world in a week. What disagreements or ambiguity’s Newton's explanation contained could be resolved, and was resolved, by a further application of the method he displayed (in the "normal science," as Kuhn calls it, which took place in the generations after Newton).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science was delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. The application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).

It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language that did not require interpretation of any sort.

There was an enormously arrogant confidence or, if we think about classical tragedy, of hubris about this, especially between some scientists and social scientists, who firmly believed that there are various contentious moral, political, and scientific questions would soon be settled for all time. The future of physics, said.

A. Mitchelton in 1894, in so that it persists concisely of little more than "adding a few decimal places to results already known."

Nietzsche, as we have already seen, sets his sights firmly against such a confidence that language, any language, can provide an accurate description of the Truth. That was, in the nature of things, impossible, because language is inherently metaphorical, it coincides to some invented fiction, with a history, a genealogy, a contingent character.

For Nietzsche, the belief that the sort of language developed by Euclid or the new science with its emphasis on precision and logical clarity-is somehow "true to nature" is, like beliefs that any system is true, plainly incorrect. All language is essentially poetry, inherently metaphorical, inherently a fabrication. Those who, like so many scientists, make claims that their descriptions of the world are true or even more accurate than alternative languages are simply ignorant of the metaphorical nature of all language.

In other words, for Nietzsche there is no privileged access to a final definitive version of life, the world, or anything else, and thus no privileged language for achieving such knowledge. Truth is, in Nietzsche's pregnant phrase, "a mobile army of metaphors," a historical succession of fictions, which does not, as Kant and Marx claimed, reveal any emerging higher truth, like progress or the march to a final utopia or a growing insight into how reality really works. In Nietzsche's view of language there is no final text available to us; There is only interpretation, or, more accurately, an unending series of freshly created interpretations, fresh metaphors.

Thus, as Rorty has observed, Nietzsche is announcing the end of the ancient war between poetry and philosophy by indicating that all we have in language is metaphor. We were mistaken in believing that the language of Euclid was anything but of another than what appears as fiction. It is not. Therefore, it has no special preeminence as the language most appropriate to a description of reality.

Since there is no privileged language and since accepting as true any inherited system of metaphor is limiting oneself to a herd existence, our central purpose is the construction of new metaphors, the assertion of new values in a language we have made ourselves. Thus, central to Nietzsche's vision of how the best human beings must live their lives is the insistence that individuals must create for themselves a new language, fresh metaphors, original self-descriptions. To escape the illusions of the past, to release the arrow in flight, these activities are linked to the creative ability to construct in one's life and language new metaphors.

Therefore, under the influence of this idea, a major part of the cultural imperative of the Twentieth Century artist has been a craze for originality, something that has produced a bewildering succession of styles, schools, experiments. When we explore Hughes' text, one of the first impressions is the almost overwhelming range of different subject matters, different styles, the pressure, even in the context of a single artist's life, constantly to invent new perspectives, new self-descriptions, new ways of metaphorically presenting one's imaginative assertions, in Nietzsche's phrase, one's will to power.

The same is true in many aspects of art: in prose style, in poetry, in architecture, in music, and so on. The influence of Nietzsche on this point (which is, as I have argued, an extension of one stream of Romanticism) has been pervasive. This phenomenon has had some curious results.

First, the constant emphasis on individualist self-assertion through new metaphors has made much art increasingly esoteric, experimental, and inaccessible to the public, for the Nietzschean imperative leaves no room for the artist's having to answer to the community values, styles, traditions, language, and so on. Thus, the strong tendency of much modern art, fiction, and music to have virtually no public following, to be met with large-scale incomprehension or derision.

This, in turn, has led to a widening split between many in the artistic community and the public. Whereas, in a great deal of traditional art, the chief aim was to hold up for public contemplation what the artist had to reveal about the nature of his vision (e.g., public statues, church paintings, public musical recitals, drama festivals), in the twentieth century the emphasis on avant garde originality has increasingly meant that much art is produced for a small coterie who thinks of them as advanced in the Nietzschean sense-emancipated from the herd because only the privileged can understand and produce such "cutting-edge " metaphors. The strong connections between much "radical" modern art and intellectual elitism characteristic of an extreme right wing anti-democratic ideologies owe much to Nietzsche's views, since the aristocratic elitism of Nietzsche's aesthetic links itself easily enough to political systems seeking some defence of "aristocratic" hierarchies (even if the understanding of Nietzsche is often skimpy at best).

Therefore, as Hughes points out, there has been a drastic decline in much high quality public art. To be popular, in fact, becomes a sign that one is not sufficiently original, a sign that one's language is still too much derived from the patois of the last people. There is still much public art, of course, especially in state architecture and market-driven television, but, as Hughes points out, the achievements in these fields are generally not impressive and may not be improving. Some, the art that commands the attention of many artists these days is increasingly private.

In the universities, Nietzsche has, rightly or wrongly, becomes the patron saint of those who believe that novelty is more important than coherence or commitment to anything outside a rhetorical display of the writer's own originality. To object that this ethos produces much irrational individualistic spouting is, its defenders point out, simply to miss the point. The creative joy of self-affirmation through new language is the only game in town, and traditional calls for scientific scholarship or social criticism on Marx's model are simply reassertions of dogmatism. There are some English departments now, for example, where in the job descriptions, the writing’s one has to produce for tenure can include confessional autobiography; in effect, to produce an aphoristic self-description, whether that is at all interesting or not, qualifies one as a serious academic scholar and teacher in some places.

Given that most of the society, including those who are maintaining the traditional scientific and economic endeavour launched in the Enlightenment, pays this sort of talk very little attention, finding most of it hard to grasp, there is thus a widening gap between much of what goes on in our society and many of its leading artists and intellectuals. The legacy of Nietzsche may cheer them up, and, in variously watered down versions, especially on this side of the Atlantic, he clearly gives them license to be strident while declaring their own superiority, but just what he offers by way of helping to cure this dichotomy (if it needs to be cured) is a question worth exploring.

The philosophical problem of self-reflective thought, the conditions of Mind reflecting itself, of consciousness observing its own actions and processes. The dilemma of Goedel's theorem regarding self-referential systems can be overcome by applying a transcendent thinking method. This higher thought provides complete knowledge of the system, but only if the individual mind is surpassed and merged with the universal mind that allows reflective thought to be perfectly legitimate. To reach true objectivity of mind means leaving the subjective mind behind, and with it, the object-subject dualism so inveterate in our ordinary thought.

How is it possible that consciousness can observe consciousness itself? How is it possible to think reflectively at all? Can we take a stance outside consciousness to observe it? Can we think about thinking per se? Can we observe thought processes, which are generally performed unconsciously? Is it possible to examine consciousness or mind with consciousness or mind itself?

These questions have often influenced exaggerated skepticism or to a negative criticism concerning the limitation of our knowledge about our mind. Some even say, which because of the fact that we have no other means of investigating consciousness than consciousness itself, this can never lead to a complete understanding of consciousness. Advocates of this view come mostly from the scientific field. Science tries to objectivise its subject matters, so that they can take a stance outside the object and look at it. The means of investigation within experimental sciences are always to mean independence of the object, although this situation must be restrained to the field of classical physics. In Quantum physics, however, experiments cannot be measured without the observer as a conscious living being. As a crucial point, it can be stated generally, that we can have completed knowledge of an object only when we are independent and outside it at the moment of observation.

The problem of completeness of knowledge is encountered when you leave the rigid field of natural sciences. Any attempts to apply the completeness theorem to social sciences, such as psychology and sociology are doomed inevitably, because in those sciences, the object of investigation is identical with the investigator. A psychologist, for example, cannot investigate the psychical processes of another individual in the way a natural scientist investigates physical processes.

First of all, psychic events are not describable as to physical properties and therefore seem evasive. Second, we deal here with a much more complex structure than we ever meet in the physical world. This complexity entails necessary incompleteness. The structure we deal here is not only more complex but also is what we call consciousness or mind. Here we have the identity of the object and its investigator, which was absent in natural sciences. So, are we human beings ever able to know what consciousness and mind really are or are we left forever in the dark and allowed only partial knowledge?

The answer to this question depends on our current understanding of what consciousness or mind is. If we reduce mind to a set of physical properties or equal it with emergent properties of the brain (materialistic and epiphenomenalistic view), we are held to believe, that it will one day is possible to know everything about consciousness. Ever more, however, scientists leave the terrain of a mere materialistic or reductionistic view of the mind and come to the conclusion, that mind is more than the sum of the brain's physical properties or more than a complex structure that emerged from the brain during the evolution of the human being. There are a lot of arguments against the reductionism of mind.

If we tend to believe that consciousness and mind are more than physicalism probably cannot describe, we are still left with the question whether we will be able to resolve this uncertainty of knowledge concerning the nature of our mind. The ordinary view of consciousness is, that it is local to every individual. If we take this as a fact, we will never be able to explain consciousness completely, because now we ran into Goedel's Theorem of the incompleteness of any self-referential system.

In brief, Goedel's theorem states that for any formal system there is certain self-referencing assertion about the system that cannot be evaluated as either wholly true or false. They remain insoluble for our human reasoning. This paradox is originally attributed to the Cretan Epimenides who presented the statement "I am lying" for being undecidable concerning truth or falsity. If it is true that I am lying, then the statement is false, and if it is false, that I am lying, then the statement is true.

This theorem sets a considerable limitation to our reasoning and thus to the ability of investigating our own consciousness or mind. It says, that we cannot make any generally accepted assertions about our mind since it is mind it that asserts something about the mind. It can therefore not decide with certainty or finality whether any statements about our mind or consciousness are logically and factually true or false. This point is only eligible if we uphold the position, which in order to acquire a complete and consistent knowledge of something, we have to be outside it, independent of it, at least formally. We can observe cells or atoms, they are part of our body, but we do not watch cells by means of cells, or atoms by means of atoms. To comprehend a system fully, we have to transcend it, by objectifying it. Only then is it open to analysis. To understand the physical world, we do not have to undertake strenuous efforts to transcend the system, because we as complex living organisms are already in a state of transcendence in relation to inanimate systems. The same applies to biological systems insofar as we are human beings have furnished the highly complex functions of consciousness, and, are again, already in a higher state than a mere biological system, even such as our body. That is not true when considering the next higher system after biology: Consciousness and mind. Where is the next higher level, from which we can study the mental system as we studied the physical and biological system from mind? Is there anything higher than mind? Can we enter supra-consciousness to study normal consciousness?

If there is something like higher consciousness or a supra-individual mind then Goedel's theorem is resolved, since then it will become possible to decide with certainty any self-referential assertions. What is more important, we are enabled, from this higher point of view, to have a complete knowledge of our ordinary consciousness or mind? This would be a revolution in modern science, such as was the Copernican Revolution or Relativity Theory or Quantum Physics: I would say, the greatest revolution of humankind until now. There would be an unlimited expansion of consciousness, of faculties of mind and with that of our knowledge of the world and ourselves.

This higher mind is the Universal Mind as distinguished from the Individual Mind. Since we stay within the bounds of the Individual Mind we are encapsulated within the frame of this limited system, limited insofar as it has personal acquired features and its knowledge depends on what this system has internalized during its development, what faculties have been nourished. So long as we are thinking as and in Exonoesis, all we can say about the ‘Exonoesis’ is hypothetical and self-referentially insoluble. When we attain a higher position by transcendably thinking for the universal and encompassing mind, we can observe and investigate its properties and its nature. This was often done unconsciously by many great philosophers and mystics. They unawares had some glimpses of the true nature of the Individual Mind while being in the Universal Mind, into which they slipped involuntarily by the sheer act of speculative thought.

We can trace these mystical and higher insights into the nature of our mind throughout the history of mankind's mental evolution. We can gather some information about this higher consciousness and are still in the infancy of the Homo sapiens evolution. Man's evolution is far from completed. As we progress into the next centuries, we will also develop more faculties of our brain and consciousness. These will eventually lead us to a complete understanding, not only of the world, but more essentially, of us as poetic beings, as minds and consciousness. We are still left with one last question: Is it possible for mind to think about itself? Is reflective Thought an unrelated comment of our being entrapped in a finite system? I do not think so.

Ever and ever again have great thinkers and philosophers proven that self-reflective thought is something innate to human beings, although used rarely, since it does not serve any direct practical or evolutionary purposes. The fact is, we can reflect upon our thinking, and the results of this thought process cannot be dismissed as entirely false or invalid. The results are often quite as certain as empirical facts in the natural sciences. Regarding reflective thinking there are more uncertain and hypothetical and speculative assertions than anywhere else within the domain of thinking. Although these speculative thoughts may be even more true than mere practical thoughts (they often only seem true), our modern age is imbued with the supremacy of analytical reasoning and its practical implications.



What makes of the Homo sapiens sapient unique ability to construct a virtual world in which the real world can be imaged and manipulated in abstract forms and idea. Evolution has produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains and tens of thousands of species with complex behavioural and learning abilities. There are also numerous species in which fairly sophisticated forms of group communication have evolved. For example, birds, primates, and social carnivores use extensive vocal and gestural repertoires to structure behaviour in large social groups. Although we share roughly 98 percent of our genes with our primate cousins, the course of human evolution widened the cognitive gap between ourselves and all other species, including our cousins, into a yawning chasm.

Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggeringly complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory input is associated with the temporal area; tactile input is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, adjacent to the mouth-tongue region of motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, adjacent to the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.

Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to assist in language processing. Until recently, the cerebellum was thought to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing well-practiced noted on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience indicate, however, that the cerebellum is activated during speaking, and most activated when the subject is making difficult word associations. It is now thought that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to fairly automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.

The midbrain and brain stem, situated on top of the spinal cord, coordinate input and output systems in the head and play a crucial role in communication functions. Vocalization has a special associations with the midbrain, which coordinates the interaction of the oral and respiratory tracks necessary to make speech sounds. Since this vocalization requires synchronous activity among oral, vocal, and respiratory muscles, these functions probably connect to a central site. This site appears to be the central gray area of the brain. The central gray area links the reticular nuclei and brain stem motor nuclei to comprise a distributed network for sound production. And while human speech is dependent on structures in the cerebral cortex as well as on rapid movement of the oral and vocal muscles, this is not true for vocalisation in other mammals.

Most experts agree that our ancestries became capable of fully articulated speech based on complex grammar and syntax between two hundred thousand and some hundred thousand years ago. The mechanisms in the human brain that allowed for this great achievement clearly evolved, however, over great spans of time. In biology textbooks, the list of prior adaptations that enhanced the ability of our ancestors to use language normally includes the following: an increase in intelligence, significant alterations of oral and auditory abilities, the separation or localization of functions to the two sides of the brain, and the evolution of some sort of innate or hard-wired grammar. But when we look at how our ability to use language could have actually evolved over the entire course of hominid evolution, the process seems more basic and more counterintuitive than we had previously imagined.

Although we share some aspects of vocalization with our primate cousins, the mechanisms of human vocalization are quite different and have evolved over great spans of time. Incremental increases in hominid brain size over the last 2.5 million years enhanced cortical control over the larynx, which originally evolved to prevent food and other particles from entering the windpipe or trachea; this eventually contributed to the use of vocal symbolization. Humans have more voluntary motor control over sound produced in the larynx than any other vocal species, and this control is associated with higher brain systems involved in skeletal muscle control as opposed to just visceral control. As a result, humans have direct cortical motor control over phonation and oral movement while chimps do not.

The larynx in modern humans is positioned in a comparatively low position to the throat and significantly increases the range and flexibility of sound production. The low position of the larynx allows greater changes in the volume to the resonant chamber formed by the mouth and pharynx and makes it easier to shift sounds to the mouth and away from the nasal cavity. The dramatic result is that sounds that comprise vowel components of speech become much more variable, including extremes in resonance combinations such as the “ee” sound in “tree” and the “aw” sound in “flaw.” Equally important, the repositioning of the larynx dramatically increases the ability of the mouth and tongue to modify vocal sounds. This shift in the larynx also makes it more likely that food and water passing over the larynx will enter the trachea, and this explains why humans are more inclined to experience choking. Yet this disadvantage, which could have caused the shift to e selected against, was clearly out-weighed by the advantage of being able to produce all the sounds used in modern language systems.

Some have argued that this removal of constraints on vocalization suggest that spoken language based on complex symbol systems emerged quite sudddenly in modern humans only about one hundred thousand years ago. It is, however, far more likely that language use began with very primitive symbolic systems amd evolved over time to increasingly complex systems. The first symbolic systems were not full-blown language systems, and they were probably not as flexible and complex as the vocal calls and gestural displays of modern primates. It is also probable that the first users of primitive symbolic systems coordinated most of their social comminations with call and display behaviours like those of modern apes and monkeys.

Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills is that behavioural adaptions tend to precede and condition biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When th first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably did si in a very haphazard fashion by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. But the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.

The fist stone choppers appear in the fossil remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. It is reasonable to assume that these primitive tools, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool maskers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already in the process of being adapted for symbol learning.

The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions I the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. This adaption was enhanced over time by increased connectivity to brain regions involved in language processing.

It is easy to imagine why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.

The crude language of the earliest users of symbols must have been replete with gestures and nonsymbiotic vocalizations, and spoken language probably became a reactively independent and closed system only after the emergence of hominids to use symbolic communication evolved, symbolic forms progressively took over functions served by non-vocal symbolic forms. This is reflected in modern languages. The structure of syntax in these languages often reveals its origins in pointing gestures, in the manipulation and exchange of objects, and in more primitive constructions of spatial and temporal relationships. And we still use nonverbal vocalizations and gestures to complement meaning in spoken language.

While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured preadaptive changes required for symbolic communication. But as this communication resulted in increasingly more complex behaviours, social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageous within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.

Since this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species, this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.

If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained in terms of, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths is proceeding by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the actual experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how complete, ca account for the actualized experience of a thought or feeling as an emergent aspect of global brain function.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the actual experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness, conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

Even so, we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality appears to be associated with the emergence of new wholes that ae greater than the orbital parts, and the entire biosphere appears to be of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. If, however, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems as marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the elf-organizing properties of biological life.

Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language system that is particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of self. Consciousness of self as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this self and the other selves. Self, as it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a self-referential character in a mental realm separately distinct from the material realm. It was, the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his famous dualism in an effort to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.

Based on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds. It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, derives its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of selves and world is an illusion that disguises of its own actualization such to find the totality of its relations between the part that is of its own characterized self as related to the temporality of being whole that is biological reality. It can be viewed, of a proper definition of this whole must not only include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole of the cosmos and the unbroken evolution of all life from the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should also include the complex interactions between all the parts in biological reality that resulted in emergent self-regulating properties in the whole that sustained the existence of the parts.

Based on complications and complex systems in ordinary language conditioned the development of descriptions of physical reality and the metaphysical concerns that loom largely in the history of mathematics and that the dialogue between the mega-narratives or frame tales of religion and science was a critical factor in the minds of those who contributed to the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Allowing to the better understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality as marked by the result in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.

In whatever way, no assumptions are to be taken for granted, and no thoughtful conclusion should be lightly dismissed as fallacious in studying the phenomenon of consciousness. Becoming more even, so that of exercising intellectual humanness and caution must try to move ahead to reach some positive conclusion on the topic.

Our consciousness evinces a striking unity, its taken measure in concert with consciousness can take more than one form even when we are conscious, its conscious state of representation is an immediate distribution of contentual contributions of awakening internal representational states of several provinces. If to any given direction we can assemble of these affairs in that our relations are the assemblage of variously existing avenues.

I am aware not only of ‘A' and, the separate entity of 'B' and, again, as separately to 'C', even so, a unity exists in them as they are representations that abide of themselves as of 'A-and-B-and-C', each of which appears of an abounding to some successive set-order as consequentially an equivalent of any regional grade of ordering. Equivalent to which must bestow the gross effectuality to only appear of periodicity, insofar as to be awarded in each respective range of heir spatial regionality. Simply in that no partially associated direction is as yet conceptually given to those spaces or regional recognition. The evincing peculiarity of assorted extension over which time deems of its owing necessity to arises within each in their own but owing constitutional states of consiousness. We are regionally met within the depths of internal opuses that lay existent to latencies of regained and simultaneous of each other. Justly forwarded in the betterment of all who are equitably contributive of having been associated through non-specified paradigms as they are affiliated by some, the assemblages gathered open-hearted of neuronal excitation, by this in themselves are the directorial senses which has of laying their existent nerve channelling transmittance, which are they that their assembling the form ‘A’. In the same manner the wilfully attempt in across to some forming of instinctuality in gathering both sodium and ionized particularities are those in an excitable state, whereby to each score is to address the unifying order of latent primivities. As these schematical leaps across the synapse are to fulfil their calls by some dissassociated quantification. If only to reflexive instincts they leap cross successfully and bind of a new beginning as to journey as attached within the neuronal transmitter. Travelling through by a continuous length to succumb by their temporal existence which at some point are met by the causal infractions that they remain of a nourishing production. These qualifying aspects are not only that they are readily adjoined by some newly charged excitability, but are so charged withing their particulated point as built through self-referential engagements. In this case, the neuronal encounter travels its journey to an end point of ‘B’. Each having to some affiliation of filamentous infiltration, that of some stimulated set-charged fibril excitations do occur.

By journeys end, their ways have been met by directional impulse that holds to them of constituent components, each in turn are awaiting an awakening state as distributively structured by conscousness, or for which their contributive continuity grants of their leap across the synapse, justly as for reasons that for each composite cell is a subroutine, whereas, each in these potentially vanquishable states are mind-set actualisations as brought the totality of spatially temporal exercisers. Only through one and another that they are the attributive and unstretching of the constitution, as we can depict of particle objects. Yet, the contentually representations that find of these are their determinant representation of firmly grounded and steadfast responsiveness that for reasons unseen that each is stationed of some purposive state of consciousness. The contemporary world of epistemological phenomenons has been called to name by the endeavouring "unity of consciousness."

Of these implications in human terms is a view that finds of the relationship between mind and world as applicably to challenge by conviction the imparting transformation. That, even so, through its first formalized distinction had become to insurmountable moments that appear in a realm separate and distinct from nature. It essentially disallows the prospect that the physical reality described by physical theory can have any other meaning, then to imply, for their own purposes, to fully recognize and understand is that the descriptions of physical reality are effectually to resolve or eliminate all aggravated dilemmas.

Numerous writers, along with a few well-known new-age gurus, have played fast and loose with implications of some new but informal understanding to ground the mental in some vague sense of cosmic consciousness. However, these new age nuances are ever so erroneously placed in the new-age section of a commercial bookstore and purchased by those interested in new-age literature, they will be quite disappointed.

Our frame reference work is mostly to incorporate in an abounding set-class affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. Basically, the essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.

But at the end of this sometimes arduous journey lay to conclusions that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing I the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.” in addition, let us consider the legacy in Western intellectual life of the stark division between mind and world sanctioned by René Descartes.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, on the grounds that he made epistemological questions the primary and central questions of the discipline. But this is misleading for several reasons. Un the first, Descartes conception of philosophy was very different from our own. The term “philosophy” in the seventeenth century was far more comprehensive than it is today, and embraced the whole of what we nowadays call natural science, including cosmology and physics, as well as subjects like anatomy, optics and medicine. Descartes reputation as a philosopher in his own time was based as much as anything on his contributions in these scientific areas. Secondly, even in those Cartesian writings that are philosophical in the modern academic sense, th e epistemological concerns are rather different from the conceptual and linguistic inquires that characterize present-day theory of knowledge. Descartes saw the need to base his scientific system on secure metaphysical foundations: By “metaphysics” he meant inquires into God and the soul and in general all th first things to be discovered by philosophizing. Yet, he was quick tyo realize that there was nothing in this view that provided untold benefits between heaven and earth and united the universe in a shared and communicable frame of knowledge, it presented us with a view of physical reality that was totally alien from the world of everyday life. Even so, there was nothing in this view of nature that could explain or provide a foundation for the mental, or for all that of direct experience as distinctly human, with no ups, downs or any which ways of direction.

Following these fundamental inquires that include questions about knowledge and certainty, but even here, Descartes is not primarily concerned with the criteria for knowledge claims, or with definitions of the epistemic concepts involved, as his aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. And with this, Descartes was convinced that the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas, and this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.

A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, said Descartes, with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modeling became the most powerful tools of modern science. And the dream that the entire physical world could be known and mastered through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and guiding principle of scientific knowledge.

The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanisms in the absence of any concerns about its spiritual dimension or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile, or eliminate Descartes’s stark division between mind and matter became perhaps the most central feature of Western intellectual life.