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Monday, May 14, 2007

Nietzsche on a sublime late-growth of hedonism

Posted by John Holbo on 05/14/07 at 09:26 AM

This isn’t commentary on Joseph’s post below - or, if it is, it is rather oblique. Hedonism isn’t a key word for Nietzsche, but I happen to have come across one appearance recently in Antichrist, §31. Thus, a fresh translation. Make of it what you will:

The instinctive hatred of reality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and stimulation, which can no longer stand being touched, because it feels every contact too deeply.

The instinctive exclusion of all antipathy, all enmity, all boundaries and distances regarding feeling: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and stimulation which experiences all resistance, even all necessary resistance as unendurable (that is, as baneful, as something against which the instinct to self-preservation warns us); and which acknowledges as blessed (pleasurable) only lack of resistance to anybody, to evil or to evil ones - love as the only, as the last possible way of life ...

These are the two physiological realities on which, out of which, the doctrine of redemption grew. I call this a sublime late-growth of hedonism out of thoroughly morbid ground. Cheek by jowl, although with a generous allowance of Greek vitality and nervous energy, is Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of redemption. Epicurus a typical décadent: first recognized as such by me. — The fear of pain, even of the infinitely smallest pain—this can end in no other way than as a religion of love ...

Comments

A nice crystallization of the roots of Nietzsche’s genealogy. I think there is a passage in _Ecce Homo_ in which Nietzsche predicts that the age of the last men (the decomposition of Christianity into socialism) will be one of terrible wars. Eric Voegelin has an excellent essay on Nietzsche (from Essays 1940-52) in which he observes that the “despiritualized happiness” of the last men is the “twin brother of despiritualized brutality.” Voegelin turns out to be much more sympathetic to Nietzsche than I expected, given the former’s avowedly positive view of Plato. Voegelin, in fact, claims Nietzsche as a sort of Platonist - believing like Plato that a well-ordered soul is the precondition for a well-ordered society. As you can see, Voegelin’s concerns are quite distant from those of Heidegger.

By on 05/15/07 at 02:55 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Thanks Peter (I don’t know why the comment counter is registering the first comment as 0 still. Maybe it will show now.)

By John Holbo on 05/15/07 at 09:04 AM | Permanent link to this comment

John, I’m a big fan of Nietzsche’s writing on hedonism, and his correlations between sensitivity to pleasure and the peculiar sensitivity that (for him) defines Christianity.

It’s true that “pleasure” (Apollonian) and “ecstasy” (Dionysian) are much more important terms for Nietzsche than “hedonism.” In a sense, had I titled my post “The Assault on What Is Called Hedonism,” that would have been more accurate to the undoing I wished to accomplish, an undoing of the systematization of the moral/political critique of pleasure and its cousins.

By Joseph Kugelmass on 05/15/07 at 05:09 PM | Permanent link to this comment

How about the “discipline formerly known as hedonism”? De Rougemont once remarked that in the modern period, the pursuit of amorous affairs becomes increasingly characterized by Machiavellian realpolitik, whereas politics becomes an affair of uncompromising passion, involving life or death commitments in which cool calculation and the dispassionate equanimity necessary for negotiation exercise less and less sway. The spread of passion into politics transforms the lover’s readiness to die for love into the ideologist’s readiness to murder for his cause.

By on 05/16/07 at 12:01 AM | Permanent link to this comment

Peter, De Rougemont’s analysis is priceless, on two counts. First, the sudden re-emergence of the project of “dying for a cause” in Zizek is elegantly anticipated here. Second, the personal realpolitik. When I mentioned that social outings are often sources of anxiety in my post, I had in mind, in part, the anxiety produced by the waves of Machiavellian texts that have ousted the old etiquette manuals.

By Joseph Kugelmass on 05/17/07 at 03:04 AM | Permanent link to this comment

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Monday, May 14, 2007

Nietzsche on a sublime late-growth of hedonism

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