Genealogy of Morals of Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud - Article Example

The Writer’s Name] [The Professor’s Name] [The Course Title] [Date] Philosophy Paper about Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud The secret of Emerson may be conveyed in one word, the superlative, even the superhuman, value which he found in the unit of experience, the direct, momentary, individual act of consciousness. This is the centre from which the man radiates: it begets all and explains all. He may be defined as an experiment made by nature in the raising of the single perception or impression to a hitherto unimaginable value. The skeptic who calls for Emerson's personal testimony may be readily satisfied. A single thought has no limit to its value. It is like a rush of thoughts i.e. the only conceivable prosperity. A man's whole possibility is contained in that habitual first look which he casts on all objects. The great value in life being thus established, the theory of the conduct of life is plain. Life is a quest of thoughts, a pursuit of inspirations. Beside these ends, land and goods and house and fame are nothing, and wife and child may count themselves lucky if they escape relegation to the class of baggage. Is this a consuming egotism? Not as Emerson sees it, or in any sense which the vulgar can suspect. The reader's title to an explanation on this point will be satisfied later. Meanwhile, let us remember that, for Emerson all values, even truth-values, are experimental; nothing counts that is not enjoyable, consumable, and digestible; even knowledge is either nutriment or refuse. It is probably not so much the laboriousness as what we might call the asceticism of these alpine sciences that makes them redoubtable to many minds. The reason is not over tasked, but the imagination and the sensibilities are underfed. Now if a mind ever existed in which the appetite of these latter faculties was persistent and insatiable, it was the mind of Emerson. The same need is the source of a real disability in Emerson which people have mistakenly identified with the incapacity to infer the unknown from the known. When a subject has yielded many considerations, some pro, some contra, some divided, some ambiguous, the task of holding all these points simultaneously in mind, of noting how they abet, retrench, or offset one another, and of finally striking the balance, becomes troublesome to the intellect and arid to the imagination. The "standing together" of things, the consistency, lay out of reach of his ability and even of his aspiration. As an advocate, he might have made a shift to offer a plea; as a judge he could hardly have summed up the evidence. It is theoretically possible for limitations are quick to show themselves in practice. The advanced religionist is no more secure of his power of extracting spiritual nutriment from a given object or event than the conservative worshipper is sure of invariable refreshment from the conventional apparatus of prayers and sermons. Fortune and mood is participant in both cases. Moreover, it is only in retrospect or recession that action yields its contemplative values to the faithful; the deed is legible only in the memory. Inequality, then, the mark of all authentic emotional life, is stamped upon Emerson's spiritual experience. We like to think of him as calm, and the word no doubt fits his demeanor, but his life in fact mimicked the hazard and vicissitude of the gamester's. Day by day he played for high stakes,--the insights which summed up human values for him,--sometimes winning, more often losing, always uncertain, ranging the whole scale from exultation to despondency. His life had the dramatic poignancy proper to the artist's or the adventurer's-to all lives, in short, in which the scope of fortune and the uncertainty are both great. The abstract hypothesis of a common source for truth, beauty, and goodness in the divine being is, of course, long prior to Emerson. Metaphysics is hardly an alert science, but, between its dreary paucity of topics and its strong propensity for unification, it could hardly fail to stumble upon the idea that truth and beauty, clearly elements of the world, should be declarations or manifestoes of the power that holds the world in its grasp. The simple yet mighty innovation brought forth by Emerson was to set this idea to work, to base life on this proposition, not merely to affirm but to discover--and re-discover a thousand times--the divine principle in particular experiences of truth and beauty. Not abstraction, but extraction, is the word that defines his originality. A reservation must be made, however, in favor of the priority of Wordsworth in the utilizing of landscape for this purpose. Both he and Emerson had a remarkable capacity for sitting down in the plainest, sturdiest fashion to live out a great ideal year by year and second by second. Nietzsche concludes that we stand on moral ground with this interpretation of the will to truth because, he thinks, there is no utilitarian reason that one would want to avoid deceiving oneself and others; we have already noted that to be deceived is sometimes beneficial, and so surely are deceiving oneself and deceiving others. The will to avoid deceiving can thus be grounded only in the same way that the moral will was: namely, in a metaphysical conviction that the world has a certain character that demands a certain set of values and practices. The scientific will to truth thus merely disguises the very hostility to and negation of the actual world that it condemns in morality. With this recognition, the same questions that were put to morality in the revaluation of values begin to be directed to science. For Nietzsche, then, the erection of the modern idols of personal providence and scientific rationality represents not an improvement in the wake of the destruction of the moral will, but a failure to capitalize on the opportunity that this destruction represents. Both of these responses to the revaluation of values allow people to will, as did morality. But they prevent us from developing a will out of our instincts and our experience of the actual world; instead, like morality, they enable willing only on the basis of a false metaphysical faith, only on the ground of a finite and limiting perspective. Both responses indicate a fear of the infinite, idol free horizon, and both preclude the formation of an ungrounded and independent will. If one response to the experience of infinity and chaos is to flee it for the more familiar and secure freedom of an externally grounded will, another response that Nietzsche judges to fall short of freedom is that of wallowing in the chaos without forming a will at all. In the parable of the birds, this is the fate of those who fly out over the sea, forsaking rest on land or any other perch, but who lack the instincts or stamina to make the journey successfully; in the terminology of our main theme, it is the fate of those no longer able to believe in morality or any of its surrogates, but too weak to form a will without them. For these people, the twilight of the idols signals a reversion to the initial state of decadence, in which they are subject to the immediate demands of their own instincts as to an external force, unable to form those instincts into a genuine whole, self, or will. In times like these, to be turned over to one's instincts is one fatality more. These instincts contradict, disturb and destroy one another. Today the only way to make the individual possible would be by pruning him: possible, that is, whole. The opposite happens: the claim to independence, to free development, is made most heatedly by precisely those for whom no reining in could be too strong – this applies in politics, it applies in art. But it is a symptom of decadence: our modern concept freedom is one more proof of the degeneration of instinct. Thus the celebrated modern freedom is really a sign that individuals are again at the mercy of, rather than masters over, their own instincts and drives, that they are not really individuals. They may now enjoy this condition of desegregation and dissolution, because they experience it as liberation from morality, but their enjoyment makes it no less dissolute, and no more fully liberating. The view of man that is bound to emerge from these pursuits will always fail adequately to take into account the effects of the variables it studies on the larger human actions such accounts purport to provide. And this is to say nothing for the basic values embodied in the idea of value-freeness and the effect of those values on the world. These are serious questions precisely because no question is value-free, because all questions ultimately have effects on attitudes and orientations and the consequences that result from them. The question of the attitude we bring to the future we shall create is rather dependent on our inquiries into the values we bring to our investigations, and here we can only begin with a full examination of our commitment to the ideal of value-free inquiry and an even fuller examination of why we so resolutely cling to that ideal in the face of increasingly obvious evidence of its nonexistence. That examination begins with the question of what idea of man is behind such a view and with the question of what view of man is being avoided through it. Given to strategies of displacement as we are, the most pertinent inquiry would begin with that which is avoided, but inasmuch as that is intrinsically bound up with the ideal that is projected, it will inevitably be uncovered in any case once we begin to seek for the value of our procedures and techniques. Researchers begin to get an idea of the values through a consideration of Nietzsche's, Emerson, and Freud's investigations, they offer us only a starting point, albeit a crucial one. We need still to consider more seriously the openings they have provided in order to see what the consequences of their thought are for us and to see if they provide us with a view of the world that can both describe for us our implication in a set of values that no longer works and present to us a pathway to a different set of values that more fully commits us to the limits that make our openness toward the world possible and to the discipline that that openness of the question provides us on the way to the values that we allow to emerge through that discipline. And in order to make use of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Freud, we need to move backward with them as they show us how our thought arrived where it did and forward to see what the transvaluation of our values could mean in terms of the modes of inquiry that are already available to us, in the scientific world, in the world of the human sciences, and in the sociopolitical world of which we are all a part. There is, perhaps, a larger share of despair now, and a serious postmodern would also argue that the individual himself has disappeared along with the possibility of transcendence and transcendental values, but still no one very seriously wishes to give up the individual as a lost cause, no one really wants to accept the end of the individual as we have known him -to do so seems somehow to negate the greatest of things we have hoped for. Nevertheless, it is also the case that our refusal to give up our sacred sense of the individual generates the despair and absurdity of our world, for it is only absurd when seen through the eyes of an individual who knows there is no longer any place for his conception of individuality in the world. It is the presence of the sacred self that makes the world absurd, just as it is the self's presence that makes values impossible, yet, though we claim to have learned from the moderns, we have failed to learn the lessons of the individual. We have preferred instead to live with our pain rather than reject the primary source of it. So our struggle becomes heroic because of our resistance to that negation of what is most dear to our hearts. In so resisting what we see as a void that results from the end of the individual, we have simply allowed the sense of void to saturate everything. Yet in spite of our despair at the void, it is increasingly difficult to hear what the existentialists have called an authentic voice. It is hard to find a questioner who so attentively listens to his questions in the way that Nietzsche or Heidegger did. We have spawned instead a generation of declaimers who hurl their words into the abyss in a great act of defiance, but those who would listen to the echo of the words seem hard to find. It is equally difficult to locate a thinker who, like Nietzsche, is willing to face again and again the limits of his thought, who is willing to bear the thought that marks and gives shape to that which has led up to it. We have found instead a generation of writers devoted to the destruction of the limit, writers who sniff out the limit like trained dogs and then proceed to attack with all the ferocity they can muster, ignoring the fact that the limit remains a limit after the attack. And when it comes to probing the difference of difference that was papered over through the introduction of the individual, no one has readily taken up Freud's call with the seriousness he was able to bring to the inquiry. It is not that we have failed to learn anything of value in the past fifty years, for a great deal has been done. It is rather that we have devoted ourselves to ignoring the key thoughts of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Freud even as they have come to be construed as the iconic figures of our time, and we have done so by misconstruing the value of their work as residing in the opening of the void. The conclusion that seems paramount in this view is the inherent meaninglessness of the world and our actions within it -- the irony of absurdity still dominates our thought like a gray cloud that will not go away. The absurdity of the postmodern condition is framed by three general principles: (1) an attempt to live with our inability to transcend our world; (2) an attempt to accept the consequence that therefore no values are transcendent, which leads us to the false conclusion that everything is valueless; and (3) an attempt to accept the burdens of the individual in the face of these absurdities. Bibliography Emerson Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "American Scholar." Essays & lectures. Library of America, 1983. 53-71. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Experience." Essays & lectures. Library of America, 1983. 469-492. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Fate." Essays & lectures. Library of America, 1983. 943-968. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-reliance." Essays & lectures. Library of America, 1983. 257-282. Freud, Sigmund. "5 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis [1915-1917]." Strachey 15: 81-239. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Geneology of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 197. Read More