Tag Archives: Nietzsche

Nietzsche as Reservoir Dog With ‘Style’

A few months ago, an  ex-student of mine sent me the image–courtesy bros.failblog.org–above. It made him chuckle out loud; he was in a library when he came across it and decided to send it to me because he thought I would have a similar reaction. (This was shortly after I had announced that I would be teaching a Nietzsche seminar in the spring semester.) Well, it made me chuckle and chortle a bit. I sent it on to a couple of friends–yup, they chuckled too–, and went so far as to make it my GMail profile image.

But what is so funny here? The juvenile rhyming, the placement of the sunglasses on Nietzsche’s otherwise solemn visage, the color coding in black and white that evokes Tarantino-cool? Well, of course. And they work because in turning Nietzsche into a Reservoir Dog,  the image reinforces a well-established not-so-academic impression of Nietzsche that supposedly appeals to angsty undergraduates and teenagers everywhere: the ass-kicking, taking-no-prisoners polemicist, slashing and burning his way through the thickets of orthodoxy.  (This is the Nietzsche imagined walking into a Wild West saloon, and suggesting, not so gently, that everyone put down their rotgut whisky and pay attention to the Zarathustrian gunslinger now in town.) It might also be the Nietzsche that tries to emerge from Ecce Homo, letting everyone know what time it is, and why indeed, the clocks have been commanded to do so by him.

Let’s not forget too, that if you wanted to dig a bit deeper, you could associate ‘sunglasses’ with ‘style,’ and well, when you think of Nietzsche, don’t you remember all those times he went on–and on–about ‘style’?

From The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 290:

Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Or, from Twilight of the Idols, “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man”, Section 11:

The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself as a grand style.

Finally, it might also be that we associate Nietzsche with laughter, for he often makes us laugh out loud when we read him. Sometimes the laughter is provoked by his wordplay, his puns; sometimes it is evoked by the pleasure he provides us as he goes after those that deserve his scorn, far more skillfully than we can imagine ourselves ever being able to. Nietzsche knows he can be a joker and a jester; in dressing him up as he has been above, we are reminded of that aspect of his persona. There was plenty of grimness in Nietzsche’s life, but his writing, at least, often tried its best to keep that at bay.

The Fallacious Knowing-How, Knowing-That Distinction

Over at the Stone, Jason Stanley offers some thoughtful remarks on the fallacious distinction between the practical and the theoretical, or rather, between practical and theoretical knowledge. Stanley examines the case to be made for the dichotomy between reflection–’guided by our knowledge of truths about the world’–and action–’guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions’:

If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Stanley dismisses this distinction by way of considering and rejecting different ways in which a ‘bright line’ could be drawn between practical and theoretical knowledge (for instance ‘talking’) and concludes with:

The plumber’s or electrician’s activities are a manifestation of the same kind of intelligence as the scientist’s or historian’s latest articles — knowledge of truths….The distinction between the practical and the theoretical is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides. It is fortunate, then, that it is nothing more than a fiction.

I find Stanley’s analysis congenial, though I would collapse the distinction from the other direction. That is, I consider ascriptions of knowledge to be recognitions of practical abilities: to know a ‘truth’ is to bear a particular practical relation to the world, of being capable of interacting with the world in particular ways; of making some kinds of judgments and not others; knowing-that is a species of knowing-how.  To ascribe knowledge is not to recognize a special mental state, distinguished by some peculiar, yet-to-be-specified relationship with a proposition. Knowers are doers first and foremost. To know something is to be either doing or to be capable of doing (like making certain utterances and not others, for instance). A knower is distinguished from a non-knower by his actions, by his placement within a nexus of active relationships.

There are some advantages to thinking of knowledge in these terms. It makes more continuous the relationship between humans, animals, and other entities in the world such as sophisticated machines; animals can ‘know’ too, even if they cannot be understood as knowing propositions. To confine ourselves to propositional accounts of knowledge is to make human knowledge a singularity in the natural world; it means we cannot meaningfully make claims like ‘My cat knows the mouse is behind the door’ (or at least when we do it is by making a distinction between ‘animal’ and ‘reflective’ knowledge); it fails to acknowledge the cat’s particular interactions with its environment. It prompts meaningless questions like  ’Who does the knowing?’ when it comes to ascribing knowledge to sophisticated systems such as robotic currency traders.

The long, protracted disputes in epistemology bear adequate testimony to the futility of trying to think of knowledge in excessively mentalistic and semantic terms. Thinking of knowledge as a species of interaction, a description of an agent enmeshed in his world and distinguished from others that don’t know what it does by its actions, clears up many of the puzzles created by traditional epistemology. This understanding of knowledge has its own distinguished pedigree in the history of philosophy, of course, most notably in Wittgenstein, Dewey and Nietzsche. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spin those views out a bit more here in future posts.

Nietzsche on the Discontinuity Between Definitions and History

From The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 2, Section 13:

Only something which has no history is capable of being defined. 

The first time I read the Genealogy, I somehow skipped this line, or at least did not pay undue attention to it. When I read the Genealogy again, I didn’t miss it, and I paid attention: I underlined it, put the book down, and went for a walk.  This is no exaggeration; I did have to stop reading for a bit so that I could think about what I had just read. Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, manages, somehow, effortlessly to produce line after line like this, rich and textured, pregnant with diverse possibilities, meanings, and allusions. Freud famously said he had to stop reading Nietzsche not just because he feared he would find that Nietzsche had anticipated too many of his ideas but also because–as he noted on another occasion–he found the constant barrage of ideas and philosophical theses too rich to digest all at once. While Nietzsche is immensely readable, he is not ‘unputdownable.’ Quite the contrary.

Incidentally, the line that precedes this sentence, reads, in full:

(Today it is impossible to say clearly why we really punish; all ideas in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of being defined)

Only Nietzsche, I think, could have written such a line as part of a parenthetical remark, and only he, I think, could have used that line as a follow-up to the clause that precedes it, amplifying and sharpening it brilliantly.

The line I have quoted is a famous line, and the shelves of libraries the world over creak under the weight of scholarship related to its meanings. (Now I exaggerate, but I’m posting on Nietzsche here, so these sorts of excesses should be forgiven. Constant engagement with a mode of discourse often tends to induce those same modes in oneself.)

But  consider, just for a moment, how much Nietzsche manages to encapsulate in his statement: an acknowledgement of the Heraclitean nature of being as endless becoming, of its history as a ‘record’ of change and contingency, and given the nature of definition as either a statement of identity or the enumeration of necessary and sufficient conditions–so that the definiens and definiendum are linked by a biconditional–the clear, stark, opposition between the two. Being is in time, and thus has history; definitions place themselves outside of time, by attempting to circumscribe, delineate, and establish sharp boundaries. The two are destined never to meet.

The mathematician’s or logician’s definitions work within a formally defined system with tightly anchored meanings; their formal structure, their definite anchoring of symbols is what makes possible their definitions. So the ‘eternal’ truths of mathematics and logic are timeless precisely because they rest on symbols whose meaning is anchored within a formal system and thus, lack history. (Of course, for Nietzsche, even this is a sort of elaborate fiction, an agreement to look past the histories of meanings of the symbols employed; for these systems’ ideas too, have entire processes ‘semiotically summarized’ within them.) For anything else, subject to history and interpretation, caught up in systems of constant reinterpretation and articulation, truth can remain a moving target.

Arendt and Sontag on Conservatism, Romanticism, and ‘Interesting’ Politics

Last week at Brooklyn College, the Wolfe Institute‘s Spring 2012 Faculty Study Group met to discuss Corey Robin‘s The Reactionary Mind, which aims to identify substantive theses central to that political tradition by way of an intellectual history of conservatism; more precisely, by close readings of some central works of the conservative canon. (The Faculty Study Group is organized by the Wolfe Institute every semester to read and discuss an academic work of interest; this semester’s selection of The Reactionary Mind had already generated some pre-discussion controversy.)

Our meeting last week was considerably enhanced by Corey Robin himself,  who joined our discussions of Chapters 6, 7, 8. I expected the discussion to not be restricted to these chapters, of course, and I was not disappointed. Over the course of our two-hour interaction, we were able to get Corey to describe the book’s central thesis–that conservatism is reactionary, counter-revolutionary politics, infused with romantic sentiment, responding vigorously to perceived threats –, clarify some theoretical points, and consider possible sharpenings and applications of his thesis. (One extension of great interest to me is to apply Corey’s central claims to conservatism beyond American and European shores.)

One of the most interesting clarifications of Robin’s thesis was the centrality of the romantic impulse in conservatism. Indeed, it seemed, after our discussions, that the romantic impulse is perhaps even more central than the reactionary, counter-revolutionary component of conservatism; it certainly explains conservative fascination with war, the attraction it presents to ‘outsiders,’ its glorification of strength and individual striving. (I intend to write a post very soon that explores the connection between the sentiments of the immigrant and the romantic imagination.)

There are some interesting theoretical resonances of this association of conservatism with romanticism.

First, here is Hannah Arendt (again!) in On Revolution, Penguin, 1990, page 197:

However that may be, the reason why the men of the revolutions turned to antiquity for inspiration and guidance was most emphatically not a romantic yearning for past and tradition. Romantic conservatism – and which conservatism worth its salt has not been romantic? – was a consequence of the revolutions, more specifically of the failure of revolution in Europe; and this conservatism turned to the Middles Ages, not to antiquity; it glorified those centuries when the secular realm of worldly politics received its light from the splendour of the Church, that is, when the public realm lived from borrowed light. The men of the revolutions prided themselves on their ‘enlightenment’, on their intellectual freedom from tradition, and since they had not yet discovered the spiritual perplexities of this situation, they were still untainted by the sentimentalities about the past and traditions in general which were to become so characteristic for the intellectual climate of the early nineteenth century.[emphasis added]

Then, here is Susan Sontag, in ‘An Argument About Beauty’, (from At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2007, page 9), where, after considering that works of art might be described as ‘interesting’ as opposed to ‘beautiful’ in an attempt to make them ‘more inclusive’:

What is interesting? Mostly, what has not previously been thought beautiful (or good). The sick are interesting, as Nietzsche points out. The wicked too. To name something as interesting implies challenging old orders of praise; such judgments aspire to be found insolent or at least ingenious. Connoisseurs of ‘the interesting’–whose antonym is ‘the boring’–appreciate clash, not harmony. Liberalism is boring, declares Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political written in 1932. (The following year he joined the Nazi Party.) A politics conducted according to liberal principles lacks drama, flavor, conflict, while strong autocratic politics–and war–are interesting. [links added]

‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk

In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes:

Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded as if he were a latter-day Goethe by a would-be Eckermann, revealed his hatreds quite plainly.

Two notes:

1. The Goethe-Eckermann reference is, of course, to Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, the book famously referred to by Nietzsche in the following section (#109) from The Wanderer and his Shadow:

The Treasure of German Prose.  Apart from Goethe’s writings and especially Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again?  Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms, the first book of Jung Stilling’s Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter’s St.  Martin’s Summer and Gottfried Keller’s People of Seldwyla — and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.

2. I’ve never read anything by Hitler, but I have seen videos of his speeches, where he does not seem to ramble.  But in The Mask of Command, John Keegan does us all a service by providing us a sample of Hitler’s “table-talk.” As Keegan notes, these transcripts were recorded by a note-maker, Heinrich Heim, who was ordered to do so by Martin Bormann. Here is an excerpt:

When all’s said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might have abandoned Gothic architecture for the light, airy, bright architecture of the Counter-Reformation? In the face of Luther’s efforts to lead an upper clergy that had acquired profane habits back to mysticism, the Jesuits restored to the world the joy of the senses….Fanaticism is a matter of climate—for Protestantism, too, has burnt its witches. Nothing of that sort in Italy, The Southerner has a lighter attitude towards matters of faith….It’s remarkable to observe the resemblances between the evolution of Germany and that of Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the ecumenical desires of the papacy….I must say, I always enjoy meeting the Duce. He’s a great personality. It’s curious to think that, at the same period as myself, he was working in the building trade in Germany. Our programme was worked out in 1919, and at that time I knew nothing about him….If the Duce were to die, it would be a great misfortune for Italy. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars….Italy is the country where intelligence created the notion of the State. The Roman Empire is a great political creation, the greatest of all. The Italian people’s musical sense, its liking for harmonious proportions, the beauty of its race! The Renaissance was the dawn of a new era, in which Aryan man found himself anew.

And on and on and on. Albert Speer notes, ‘[T]he collection includes only those thought significant. Complete transcripts would reinforce the sense of stifling boredom’. Phew.

Incidentally, I’ve only just discovered Hitler’s Table-Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations (Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Introduced and with a new Preface by H.R. Trevor-Roper, Enigma Books 2000). I certainly don’t have the time or the inclination to read the whole thing, but there is plenty of material in there to strike us numb.

Goethe and Nietzsche on the Freedom Program

A couple of days ago, while whiling away my time on Twitter, distracted from writing, and possibly other, more “productive” activities, I noticed Corey Robin tweet: “What would Nietzsche say about the fact that I need the Freedom program to write about Nietzsche?” My glib reply: “I think he’d love the irony of it! You haven’t ‘overcome’ yourself (or your distraction) yet.” To which Corey then wrote, “Or maybe he’d see it as the life-giving form I’ve imposed on myself in order to create. Crap, yes, but create nonetheless” and then went on to quote Nietzsche himself (from Beyond Good and Evil, Section 188; the passage is worth reading in its entirety):

But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in touch itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the ‘tyranny of such capricious laws’.

A particularly appropriate quote under the circumstances.

On an academic note, I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between constraint and creativity for a long time. In Chapter 3 of Decoding Liberation, Scott Dexter and I tried to develop a theory of aesthetics for software, a crucial role in which is played by the presence of technical constraints on programmers’ work. More personally, as someone who is perennially distracted, who finds writing almost fiendishly difficult for that reason, and has often attempted to impose ‘Internet-fasts’ on himself in order to ‘produce,’ I remain intrigued and challenged by the need to restrain oneself in order to be truly free when it comes to self-expression (I’m indulging in the conceit here that writing is an activity that enables that.)

My struggles with working in the presence of the distraction–a ‘freedom’ that detracts from the ‘freedom’ of writing–are constant; sometimes those distractions are other daily, mundane responsibilities, sometimes willful procastination, and these are experienced by almost any one that sets out to ‘create’ in any shape or form whatsoever. And in those moments of struggle to get to work, where a particular freedom awaits us, we always struggle with the call of the alternative ‘freedom’.   And the peculiarity of it all, when we do manage to get to ‘creating,’ is a sense that somehow, restraint is an inseparable part of being free.

Of course, poets have said it better than I could.  So, without further ado, we have Goethe on the subject:

Nature and Art (Natur und Kunst)

Nature and art–they seem to split and flee
And find each other before one thinks about it. 
My stubbornness too has been completely routed
So right now both seem to appeal to me.
 
What’s missing is only an honest preparation!
The fact is that if we first devote hard hours–
Of spirit, of work–to art, accepting its powers, 
The heart once more feels nature’s illumination
 
That’s how it goes with every transformation:
All struggles to reach the perfection of airy summits
Prove useless to spirits feeling only liberty.
 
Whoever wants what’s best seeks combination:
A master first reveals himself in limits,
And law alone can truly set us free. 
 

Hegel’s Stoic and Prison Literature

In his Introduction to Hegel’s Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, 1969, pp 30-31), Ivan Soll notes that,

With great sociological and psychological insight Hegel says that “stoicism, the freedom which goes back into the pure universality of thought, could appear as a general form of the world spirit only in a time of general fear and servitude but also of general education, which had taught men to think” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 153). The point seems to be that the frustration of the freedom of act results in the search of a type of freedom immune to such frustration. Where the capacity for abstract thoughts exists, freedom, outwardly thwarted, is sought in thought. Hegel seems to suggest that the stoic’s freedom is what Freud might call a substitute gratification.

While Soll goes on to argue–in the very next sentence–that,

However, this suggestion, interesting and true as it may be, is not completely consonant with the genesis of stoicism in the Phenomenology. Although stoicism arises from servitude rooted in fear, it does not arise because the servant is not allowed to act freely, but because all action proves ultimately futile.

it is still worthwhile to think about why this “insight” of Hegel might be thought perspicuous independent of the particular theoretical standing of “stoicism” in Hegel’s system.

This perspicuity is best illustrated by a species of intellectual production intimately associated with physical confinement: prison literature. The list of this genre’s standout items–The Consolations of Philosophy, The Pilgrim’s Progress etc–is truly staggering and populated with luminaries–Boethius, John Bunyan, Marquis De Sade, Jean Genet etc–seemingly beyond count. Here, constraint becomes conducive to creativity; the slamming door of one gate is merely the prompt to the unlocking of another. It is not a conceptual necessity associated with the act of confinement, but rather, a very particular, contingent reaction by some. For this actor, confinement does produce the search for “substitute gratification”–whether conscious or unconscious–and, to continue to use Freudian language, the channeling of the drive toward freedom into the drive for concrete expression of abstract thought. Where freedom to act is not so appropriately, powerfully, and masterfully, directed towards the substitute activity of alternative expression it can, of course, become pathologically repressed instead. (The Nietzsche of the second essay of The Geneaology of Morals would nod his head at this point, I think.)

The prison writer is, like the Hegelian stoic, still a seeker of freedom but, unlike the Hegelian stoic, not one that has considers all action futile. Rather he has come to see that actions are still available to him, even if not those that had previously been available to him as a fuller mode of physical expression. So, like the Hegelian stoic, he has moved from considering freedom to being a purely practical affair to being a “peculiarly theoretical and epistemological one” (Soll, 30) but one still grounded in the activity of writing.

Those that place prisoners in solitary confinement are onto a vitally necessary piece of knowledge for the oppressor: if confinement is to work as a mode of repression, it must aspire to as much totality as possible.

Update: Just chatting with Corey Robin over on Twitter, who suggested adding Gramsci, Solzhenitsyn and Bukharin to the genre of prison literature, and also noted the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s remarks about totalitarianism to my last sentence.  Good points of course; my small list above merely scratches the surface, and I would even supplement Arendt with the Orwell of 1984.

Nietzsche, Power, and Bible-readers on the Subway

Last evening, after a full day of work teaching Philosophy of Biology, a seminar on Nietzsche, and conducting a teaching observation of a graduate fellow, I left campus for my evening weightlifting session. I was feeling run down, and not a hundred percent. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, perhaps a nagging cluster of cold-sore throat related symptoms that were insidiously undermining my ability to face up to the world. As I rode the subway to the gym, I felt uninspired and sleepy; the book I had intended to read only had a few of its pages turned.

Thankfully, the lifting went well. I was scheduled to back squat (Crossfit South Brooklyn is following the Wendler Cycle for our strength programming), and after lifting 185×5, and 205×5, I did my maximum-repetitions set at 230 (for 12 reps). By the end of it, my legs were shaking, I was close to hyperventilating, and a clarity-inducing  surge of euphoria had seemingly cleansed me of the sluggishness of the afternoon.

I changed, and made my way to the 7th Avenue subway station to head home. As I waited for the train, I pulled out my copy of Karl Jasper‘s Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (JHU Press, 1997) , and, somehow emboldened, began to read:

The pyschology of the feeling to power: Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘will to power’ is by no means identical with his conception of the drives that aim to provide a feeling of power. The one relates to genuine being that has become extra-empirical; the other to observable psychological experience. The one involves an abstract will, intent upon determining the course of its own being; the other, the conscious pursuit of the enjoyment attending the feeling of power.

I stared back at the page. Really, was this where I had left off, and now, resumed reading?

As I sat on the bench, a lady on her way back home sat down next to me and opened up a book. It was the Bible. She opened it to Numbers 25, and began reading. I sat there for a few seconds, and then, unable to resist, spoke: “Excuse me, are you reading the Bible straight through or picking selections?” The lady smiled, and said, “I’m reading it straight through.” I then asked, “Have you read the Bible before?” She smiled again, and said, “No, I’ve read it many times before.  This time my reading has been a bit slower; I got bogged down in Leviticus for a bit.” I nodded; sometimes I too, get mired in parts of books I read.

A B train pulled in and discharged its passengers, who swarmed around us to head for the exits, as we sat there with our books open on our laps. I wondered if my new acquaintance would ask me about what I was reading, and how I would describe it if she hadn’t heard of Nietzsche. She then spoke again, “Are you a believer?” I replied, “No, but I’m always curious about people that appear to be serious readers.” Her reply was made inaudible by the arrival of the Q train. I bade her take care as I headed for a subway car.

I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought about it all: a hundred years after his death, philosophy professors, on their way home after weightlifting, reading books about his writings, sitting next to readers of the Bible, all the while ensconced in the bowels of a gigantic subterranean transportation system in an American city.

Statutory Interpretation, the “Nietzsche Rule”, and Stevens and Scalia in Zuni

From Chapter 8, (‘Doctrines of Statutory Interpretation’), Section 1, A. ‘Textual Canons’, 2 ‘Grammar Canons’, (f) ‘The Golden Rule (Against Absurdity) – and the Nietzsche Rule.  of William N. Eskridge, Jr., Philip Fricket, and Elizabeth Garrett, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, Thomson West, American Casebook Series, Saint Paul, MN, 1988:

English-speaking jurisdictions have a few catch-all rules providing a mental check for the technical process of word-parsing and grammar-crunching. The golden rule is that interpreters should “adhere to the ordinary meaning of the words used, and to the grammatical construction, unless that * * * leads to any manifest absurdity or repugnance, in which case the language may be varied or modified, so as to avoid such inconvenience, but no further” Becke v. Smith 150 Eng. Rep. 724, 726 (U.K. Exch. 1836)….

The golden rule is…an absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule….

[C]courts should be willing to revise scrivener’s errors - obvious mistakes in the transcriptions of statutes into the law books….

The golden rule and its corollaries are now subject to academic debate. Although Justice Scalia recognized an absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule in Bock Laundry (concurring opinion) scholars of various persuasions maintain that an absurd results exception to plain meaning is inconsistent with the premises of the textualism. In Zuni Pub. Sch. Dist v. Department of Educ. 127 S.Ct. 1534, 1549-50 (2007), Justice Stevens’ concurring opinion rests the absurd result exception upon notions of probable legislative intent: if a plain meaning interpretation is truly absurd, that is prima facie reason to think Congress did not it (absent evidence to the contrary, of course). Justice Scalia roundly denounced that approach, in absolute language suggesting that he now agrees with his critics that there should be no absurd results exception to the plain meaning rule. Id. at 1555-59 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Friedrich Nietzsche admonished in Mixed Opinions and Maxims No. 137  (1879): “The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole.” All the Justices would agree with this sentiment; indeed, both Stevens and Scalia invoke it in their Zuni debate. We read Nietzsche’s lesson for the statutory interpreter to include the following: Be humble. Consider how other people use language. Be helpful to the project rather than hypertechnical.

(The Nietzsche excerpt is from (as cited): Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (and Other Works), 175 (Walter Kauffman trans. ed. 1967). The authors also note, “David Krentel, Georgetown Law Center, Class of 1995, brought this maxim to our attention.”)

Brief commentary:

1. The merely obvious: not the first, and not the last, co-occurrence of Scalia and Nietzsche in a legal text or setting.

2. The invocation of “project” in the last sentence is intriguing. Indeed, the authors’ reading of Nietzsche’s “lesson” is interesting all around for its particular deployment of “humble,” “helpful,” and “hypertechnical.” The contrasts drawn and established are stark, all the more distinctive for the irony that Nietzsche  provokes for making us associate the advocacy of humility with him.

Nietzsche on Olympia Snowe’s Departure From the Senate

Olympia Snowe’s announcement that she would not seek reelection in November 2012 and would instead retire when her third term ends in January 2013 has, understandably, been the cause of much gnashing of teeth among those ostensibly committed to a more tolerant politics and to ‘pragmatism’ in legislation. Snowe herself wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, blaming, among other things, “the corrosive trend of winner-take-all politics” and “the dysfunction and political polarization [of the Senate].” (There have been other step-downs like this in the past, most notably, from the Democratic side of the aisle, Evan Bayh in 2010, and more recently, Ben Nelson.)

Snowe’s Post article does not suggest that she is leaving because she is not a Republican any more, and in her diagnosis and prognosis of the ailing legislative branch of this nation, she appears to indict Republicans and Democrats alike. She does not, after all, indicate that she feels her party alone cannot accommodate her ‘centrist’ or ‘moderate’ leanings. (I put those political orientations in quotes because, to be honest, I think I have lost my bearings on what they stand for any more in the American political landscape.) And some of those who commented on her departure incorporated this marching-in lockstep-with-party-orthodoxy-is-the-bane-of-modern-American-politics flavor in their writing. Here, for instance, is Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

Just because you choose a team shouldn’t mean you’re suddenly and miraculously on board with everything in its playbook, on down the line…Rare is the Democrat of plausible national ambition who tangles in a tough, meaningful way with labor unions or environmentalists, groups that President Obama has been loath to cross.

(My reaction to that is “Really?” but I’ll let it pass for now.)

Still, Snowe’s case will be of especial interest to those that view the Republican Party as having become completely unhinged in recent times, and Democrat spinners will only be too keen to use her resignation as exhibit Numero Uno in making this charge. Her decision to not seek reelection certainly appears more interesting when viewed in this light; In the former dimension, one can speculate about iconoclasts and persecution; in the latter, merely about boring institutional fatigue. Charges of “a pox on both your houses” sound better coming from us citizens, fed up with the Confederacy of Dunces on Capitol Hill.

Nietzsche, as usual, has something to say about this situation, and unsurprisingly, he goes for the more interesting option. So, once again, from Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits (translated by RJ Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986; this version includes Volume 2: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, from which I quote below.)

So, from Volume 2, Section 305–on page 283–reads:

Party tactics. – When a party notices that a member has changed from being an unconditional adherent to a conditional one, it is so little capable of enduring this that it tries, through incitements and insults of all kinds, to bring him to the point of outright defection and turn him into an opponent: for it has the suspicion that the intention of seeing in their faith something of relative value that admits of a For and Against, a weighing and distinguishing, is more dangerous to it than a wholesale opposition.