An Aside on Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy

In the opening pages of The Problems of Philosophy, when Bertrand Russell outlines the basic philosophical problem of appearance and reality, he writes that artists “have to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.”* His point has to do with perspective, that we see every object from a personal viewpoint or perspective. I have to wonder whether even in 1912, when The Problems of Philosophy was first published, if artists were still trying to see things as they appear. The impressionist movement, with Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, was already in full swing, perhaps even by 1912 already cresting its wave, and being muscled out by Post-Impressionism, though I suspect this is a category only bandied about by art experts. The point, simple enough, by 1912, the forefront of art had already lost interest, not only in appearance, but reality, since they were painting impressions, or interpretations, or experiences, a move that was mirrored across the Atlantic in pragmatism, which its most vocal proponent, William James, was wont to call a method, and which Russell vehemently denied could call itself a philosophy.  

* My copy of The Problems of Philosophy is a reprint, without pagination, or indeed margins wide enough for me to make notes in. Not being able to write notes in the margins drives me crazy.

Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals

I can only describe listening to Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals as embarrassing.

The first graduate class I took while still an undergraduate was a summer class in Nietzsche. A hundred pages of Nietzsche every night for five weeks. It was an experience. Ah, but what I learned. I learned how to read critically, how to follow complex and often convoluted lines of reasoning, how to identify and explicate key words and phrases. (Philosophers love to coin new words or give new names to familiar words.) I learned that you could weave understanding out of a philosopher; you didn't have to take the whole system to take what was useful to you and leave what wasn't.

I left that class with a grudging respect for Nietzsche. For quite a while afterwards I found myself saying things like, "The Nazi's misunderstood Nietszche," or "They selected passages out of context." Those youthful appreciation has been shattered while listening to The Genealogy of Morals. This time I can't help but see the "free man" described in the Essay One as emblazoned with a swastika.

Now, I find myself trying to understand my attitude from so many years ago. Reading Nietzsche through the lens of Foucault it is possible to see the free man as the intellectual resisting the "will to power" of the hegemonic discourse. Unfortunately, reading Nietzsche through the lens of Aryan superiority, it is all too easy to see the free man as an oppressor with no concern but his own power. (I am going to assume that this is one case where gendered language will be acceptable.) Either interpretation is possible. Hence, my embarrassment. Can Nietzsche be reformed by reading him as a critic of Victorian morals? Or, is he forever tainted by being read as calling for an opposition to morals in the name of power?

It is a few days later . . .

. . . and I'm in the middle of listening to Essay Three, which intrigues me as much as Essay One embarrassed me, particularly Nietzsche's exposition of the interrelated flaws of the religion, atheism, and science of his day. At the beginning of these passages, he writers that his reader is the reader who does not need to be convinced. We might understand that as the reader who already agrees with him, that is, the audience of most partisan politics. I am drawn back to Plato's distinction between the philosopher and the poet in Ion.  In Plato's parlance, Nietzsche is a poet rather than a philosopher. He is caught up in the muse of anger, and his readers are those who are attracted, like Plato's example of the lodestone, to, even caught up in, that anger.

Rage against the machine, Nietzsche.