Ambitious side project
I don't know about you folks, but while I love Nietzsche's prose and find it very compelling, I'm often frustrated by it as a philosophical work because he does not make it easy to trace the logical spine of his argument out from the writerly flourishes.
So I have an ambitious and somewhat mischievous suggestion for those with like minds: while we're reading through The Gay Science, I would like to attempt a distillation of his prose into condensed form that might be more amenable to the tools of analytic philosophy.
This would be one part scholarly work, one part game to see if Nietzsche, as an extreme representative of his kind, can be translated across the philosophical English Channel, and/or what happens to him in the process.
Take his first paragraph in the main text:
1. The teachers of the purpose of existence -- Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct-because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it. Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far.
We can look at this paragraph sentence by sentence, trying to reduce each to its propositional core:
Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race.
Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct-because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd.
It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it.
Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten.
Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species.
To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish.
Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far.
And so on. This is just a first-pass attempt at this, and part of the joy of working on it would be to have it be a collaborative project, making sure that we don't leave out any important details but making sure we cut out the fat. I hope I have demonstrated above how important I think it is that we stick as closely as possible to the text and do the absolute minimum of interpretative work, at least in this stage. But I also hope I was able to show how this method might result in some clarity--what the premises are at each step, where inferences lie, when terms are defined. I think the annotation and indexing system would have to be much more elaborate than presented above to be effective, but I think it would in the end be rewarding. In the end, we could present our analytic distillation of The Gay Science to the rest of the philosophy community as a contribution and proof that somebody can get something out of Nietzsche.
So...have I gotten anyone interested? Lane, would you mind if we worked on this in this forum, or would you rather that it was taken somewhere else?
So I have an ambitious and somewhat mischievous suggestion for those with like minds: while we're reading through The Gay Science, I would like to attempt a distillation of his prose into condensed form that might be more amenable to the tools of analytic philosophy.
This would be one part scholarly work, one part game to see if Nietzsche, as an extreme representative of his kind, can be translated across the philosophical English Channel, and/or what happens to him in the process.
Take his first paragraph in the main text:
1. The teachers of the purpose of existence -- Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct-because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it. Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish. Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far.
We can look at this paragraph sentence by sentence, trying to reduce each to its propositional core:
Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race.
- Each man in particular is concerned with doing what is good for the preservation of the human race (PHS).
- All men are concerned with doing what is good for PHS.
Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct-because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd.
- The instinct (to be concerned with PHS) is the essence of our species.
- Here, herd = species. (?)
- This instinct motivates all men's and each men's concern with the preservation of the species.
It is easy enough to divide our neighbors quickly, with the usual myopia, from a mere five paces away, into useful and harmful, good and evil men; but in any large-scale accounting, when we reflect on the whole a little longer, we become suspicious of this neat division and finally abandon it.
- When we reflect, we find we must stop dividing men into two sets, good/useful and evil/harmful.
Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten.
- The man that is most harmful (to particular persons?) may be most useful to PHS.
- The harmful man nurtures in some persons instincts which prevent humanity from becoming feeble and rotten.
- (Implied) Humanity becoming feeble and rotten is contrary to PHS.
Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species.
- Those things called evil belong to the economy of PHS.
To be sure, this economy is not afraid of high prices, of squandering, and it is on the whole extremely foolish.
- (Perhaps no useful content?)
Still it is proven that it has preserved our race so far.
- The economy of PHS has preserved our species so far.
And so on. This is just a first-pass attempt at this, and part of the joy of working on it would be to have it be a collaborative project, making sure that we don't leave out any important details but making sure we cut out the fat. I hope I have demonstrated above how important I think it is that we stick as closely as possible to the text and do the absolute minimum of interpretative work, at least in this stage. But I also hope I was able to show how this method might result in some clarity--what the premises are at each step, where inferences lie, when terms are defined. I think the annotation and indexing system would have to be much more elaborate than presented above to be effective, but I think it would in the end be rewarding. In the end, we could present our analytic distillation of The Gay Science to the rest of the philosophy community as a contribution and proof that somebody can get something out of Nietzsche.
So...have I gotten anyone interested? Lane, would you mind if we worked on this in this forum, or would you rather that it was taken somewhere else?