Ambitious side project

[paulhope]

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

Comments

[nix_nevermind]

It's a problem that you're trying to make one of Nietzsche's aphorisms shorter:

"- If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears, I do not think the fault necessarily lies with me. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do, that people have first read my earlier works without sparing themselves some effort: because they are not easy to approach. [...] In other cases, the aphoristic form causes difficulty: this is because this form is not taken seriously enough these days An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been 'deciphered' just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning of its proper interpretation, and for this, an art of interpretation is needed. In the third essay of this book I have given an example of what I mean by 'interpretation' in such a case: - this treatise is a commentary on the aphorism taht precedes it. I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practice the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting -

[nix_nevermind]

Er, the quote was from section 8 of the preface to Genealogy, translated by Carol Diethe, published by Cambridge University Press.

[paulhope]

I don't think I'd ever try to do this with any of the aphorisms. But for the more substantive pieces, I'd hypothesize that some of the rhetoric contains redundancy which can be cut...

This is only a hypothesis, of course, and I completely agree with scarbo1111 here saying that if we did this we should ask ourselves what is lost by using this method. The questions of if and why Nietzsche's form are necessary to his substance seem like interesting ones for me. If the project I'm suggesting fails, then that in itself constitutes a discovery.

[nonbeing]

While the utility and/or validity of such a project is at the discretion of the reader making the interpretation, I would like to point out that Nietzsche, himself, specifically wrote that he abhorred systematization, and to be weary of anyone who tries to envelope all metaphysical truths in a single system. I believe that is precisely the reason his prose is stylized the way it is.

[paulhope]

Yes, I'm aware that Nietzsche would hate this sort of treatment of this work, and meant to elaborate on this point.

But that's why I initially characterized this project as "mischievous."

Maybe by attempting a systematization of his work, we can discover why he didn't like it. Was it just because he just had more literary tastes? Is it because his arguments crumble under analysis? Why? Why?

If he is going to avoid hypocrisy, we need to be willing to give his own work the same treatment of laughter he applies to those that came before him. What happens if we play with his work?

[scarbo1111]

This sounds like a very worthwhile endeavor to me in terms of grappling with the text, though--at the same time--I think that form is important in Nietzsche (vs. ideas that could definitely be separated from form and style). Offhand, I can think of places where his arguments about the transvaluation of values are very much tied up in rhetorical gestures (for ex, in the first section of the Genealogy of Morals). I don't have time to elaborate at the moment, but I think it might be interesting to distill propositions from Nietzsche's writing in the Gay Science, as you suggest, but also to ask ourselves 'is anything lost here when we 'cut the fat'?

[paulhope]

but also to ask ourselves 'is anything lost here when we 'cut the fat'?

I completely agree. This is why I characterized the project as "one part game to see if Nietzsche...can be translated across the philosophical English Channel, and/or what happens to him in the process." I don't necessarily think this project could work in the sense of reducing The Gay Science into a faithfully compressed version in the style of, say, Wittgenstein's Tractatus. But I think the question remains "Why not?"

I'd be very interested to hear what you mean when you say Nietzsche's arguments are tied up in rhetorical gestures, etc.