bretty
10th October 2006, 22:35
Okay Awhile ago I was asking for opinions on a good topic for an analysis. Well here is the final product, comments and criticisms gladly welcome.
Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A De-constructive Feminist Reading
By: Brett Collins
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed using poetic aphorisms, sectioned into chapters based on the character Zarathustra's travels. The concept of the book for Nietzsche, was more or less to develop and establish his central ideas to his philosophy, further many regard his philosophy, and specific structural concepts of it that will be analyzed later, as the accumulation of Metaphysics for western philosophy (Heidegger 8). However, these necessary “transcendental signifiers”, and to note binary centers, of his structural philosophical development is something important to regard. Therefore, The first topic that will be explored is the concept of Nietzschean 'will to power' as his centralized “signified” concept for his philosophical statements in the book and the underlying prejudice and its possible deconstruction. Further the philosophy is completely sexist and relates women to illusion and deception, merely appearance. Secondly, the signification of Zarathustra's view of women as riddle and Nietzsche's statement “women as truth”, as both phallogocentric concepts that will be explored later. Both of these soon to be explored components of Nietzsche's thought will show first of all how an initially and seemingly unstructured aphoristic philosophy is structured around nonsensical statements.
The first signified, as in the sign or terminology that denotes a meaning, is called the will to power. This will to power is developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the following passage: “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master”(Nietzsche 137). This is a metaphysical and psychological idea, not a sociological observance, so it subjects living beings to this will to power characteristic, it creates upon humans an imprint of this concept. This is the centricity of his structural philosophy or in other words his “transcendental signified”, which defined is the center and irreplaceable object in his developed structure of metaphysics. One could not remove this transcendental signified without destroying the relativity and “truthfulness by reference” of all the other concepts revolving and relying around it. Much like our sun is the catalyst for life in our solar system, or structure to relate it better to Derrida's terminology. The most important thing to note is that the concept of will to power is only that, a concept. The concept itself is nonsensical because it cannot be proven by empirical evidence, it is simply posited as truth, but the real truth of the term is based entirely on the definition of “will to power” itself and not of practice or observance of the definition in a particular context. Consequently, the value of the statement from Nietzsche is based entirely on the word itself, it has no relation to the world, it is only relative to itself and other structural components of Nietzsche's philosophy. To properly deconstruct this will to power, one must look at the word “trace” as defined by Derrida. Which is the absence of presence, or in better words sensical evidence, within a defined term/signifier or plenitude of terms tied to a structure much like the will to power (Derrida 89). It is best described as a word that is “empty” in a sense. What Nietzsche tries to do, in the passage above is “totalization” which is to posit something as a theory for everything, which is an accumulation of what Derrida called Nietzsche's spurs (Derrida 70). Yet the concept of will to power is a binary concept where it has an opposing concept or a plurality of concepts, subsequently both concepts are not completely polarized. The binary opposite to the trace of will to power is not an isolated opposition, it has a multiplicity of possible concepts. The will can subsequently be the sum of many other possible goals, such as the will to life, the will to truth, and the will to nothingness. All are merely intelligible and broadly generalized concepts that have no grounding in real life, that is to say that they cannot be proven as true. Nietzsche says “All living creatures are obeying creatures” (Nietzsche 137) , which shows that the multiplicities of his trace of the will to power is not a completely lone transcendental signified. The trace of the will to power is inconsistent now with this new statement brought in, because it shows that there is more then one statement posited as true, more then one imprint on living beings. This is where the structure falls apart because the will to power has other assertions that complicate it, it is not so much simply power. The center of the structure of this Nietzschean/Zarathustran philosophy now has two statements to a degree polarized opposites yet both are asserted as universal principles. Both compete for the center of his structure. Since now Nietzchean/Zarathustran philosophy has come to this contention of centrality, there is both the assertion that “all living beings are obeying beings” and “where I found a living creature, I found the will to power”. This is where the concept of “play” comes in. Play is the “absence of transcendental signified as limitless of play”(Derrida 50), which is to say that once the center or transcendental signified has been uprooted as we have seen happen through the contention between these two statements the rules for the structure of Nietzsche's philosophy become unbound by the deconstruction of his statement of the will to power. So now the statements that were “true by reference” to the will to power center now can have a multiplicity of meanings, they are no longer part of a machined system. Much like a game, where without the objective of the game the rules become subjective and subsequently lost in disorder. This consequently leads to a destruction of meaning for the units, or other statements made, within Nietzsche's structure because they become empty statements without a centralized cause to refer back to. So picture the center, which is the will to power, as the cause and the other concepts in the philosophy as effects that now have no cause to refer back to determine their origin. Further, the linguistic discrimination comes in to play when one posits the “power” concept as greater then the the other multitude of wills. The deconstruction analysis of Nietzsche's metaphysical statement is successful, but it does not necessarily mean the structure is meaningless and that Nietzsche is wrong, it simply means that one cannot use the structure or belief system without acknowledging that it is flawed, inconsistent and therefore in no sense of the word “true” to reality. Now take the word “power” , the word power is related to progress, to action, to be in control, and further has a European origin, more specifically French with the development of the word “pouair”(Harper) , which defined is “to be able”. The development of this word through European origins, up until the middle eighteenth century wherein it became known “power” as we understand it today(Ibid). The relativeness of this words origin and development being mainly European, is a large part of its relation to the way it is used in Nietzsche's work. Nietzsche was discriminatory against women, but for now one only has to concern themselves with the origin and development of the word, and also the context in which the final stages of the word power was defined. The eighteenth century was the beginning of the enlightenment movement, which was lined fashionably with the concept of reason. Reason in this movements sense is a derivative of the concept put forth by the word logos in ancient greek, which is defined as reason and discourse(Aristotle 311). The association between the words and the society the words developed within is also correlated by the degree of subordination of women in both societies. Male's are viewed in ancient Greece and the enlightenment period as the carriers of reason, and women are seen as emotion and irrationality. The reason this is important is because it sets the stage for the second idea brought forth in Nietzsche's texts which is the idea of his structure and the center will to power, as phallogocentric.
Zarathustra discusses women in a chapter titled “Of Old and Young Women”. The first thing he says is that “one should speak about women only to men”(Nietzsche 91) which opens up his idea that everything is defined by the masculine, subsequently feminine is defined by that which is absent in masculinity. He then goes on to state that “everything about women is a riddle and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy”(ibid). First off in this excerpt he shows that women for himself is a riddle, and if one looks to the introduction to his book Beyond Good and Evil he says “Supposing truth to be a woman – What?”(Derrida 55). This shows that he views the feminine as both truth and riddle, a subsequent illusionary truth, which truth is synonymous with appearance. He goes on in this passage and says women's solution is pregnancy, the one thing that men are incapable of doing is defined as the feminine solution. Again, we see the feminine being defined by the limitations of the masculine. Immediately afterwards in this chapter Nietzsche says “For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child. But what is the woman for the man?”(ibid) he then states that men want two things: danger and play which women are for Nietzsche, the most dangerous plaything(ibid). So one can see the process of defining femininity as that which masculinity does not encompass. Also, one can see that Nietzsche's concept of truth and appearance are synonymous and that women for him is defined by these and therefrom is also defined as a riddle of truth and appearance. Afterwards Zarathustra goes on to say that “The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will” (Nietzsche 92). Once again we see the female defined by the terms and limitations the male defines himself by. This shows a fear from the masculine regarding the feminine for Nietzsche, the fear of castration in the phallogocentric sense because when women begin to become scholars, and accepted into intellectual fields, it destroys the concept that the masculine with the phallic idol is reason and depth, and the women is emotion and shallow with envy of the phallic idol. This is the binary opposite that Nietzsche views in the gender roles. One can see this binary opposite herein further: “Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters”(ibid). There lies the emotion and shallow changeable surface – appearance in a nutshell. Then he describes man as: “But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it”(ibid). Now one can see that woman is also defined in nature by her incomprehension of the masculine nature, one sees femininity in this light as a reflexive image of what the male wants. This view of women as shallow and changeable, as mere appearance dates back to Platonic concepts wherein man is depth, the unchangeable, and women is shallow image, these were polar opposites in Plato's work. Platonic concepts were transformed into the divine from the metaphysical, unchangeable, and the image remained as earthly, which can be seen as the binary opposite influencing religions post ancient Greece. So now we have the development of the masculine as divine reason and the woman as earthly, the rupture between the gender roles continues to be pulled apart by these new transformations of gender through historical times. If Nietzsche was and is an epoch in thinking, then we see this sexism of Nietzsche's as the conglomeration of sexism from ancient Greece to the modern age. And the fear is the same thing, the fear of woman's individualism transpiring to bloom is shown in these passages as the accumulation in males of fear of the masculine intellectual castration, so the male intellectual subordinates women out of fear of disrupting the binary opposites, which for men is the possession of the phallic reason. Nietzsche's writings are far away from a center of reason, yet the sexism remains closely tied to that sphere of the logos.
The types of accumulations of western metaphysics and philosophy found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra are amazing concepts for the fields of study, yet with opinion comes prejudice and the prejudice of women becomes apparent in the chapter discussed. The whole book talks about man as progress and masculinity as the human embodiment of divinity when “god is dead”(Nietzsche 41). His literary opinion of women is just an extension in modern European thought of the already existing intellectual subordination of women. With the acknowledgement of these binary opposites regarding male and female nature within his work one can deconstruct, as we have, the underlying prejudice. The will to power, women as truth, women as riddle, and happiness for women as the observance of male will found in the book are all discriminatory allusions to an ancient and continuing suppression of the female spirit.
Works Cited
1. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1979.
2. ---. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins U P, 1976.
3. Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. England: Penguin Group, 2004.
4. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. November, 2001. October 9, 2006. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=power>
5. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Fransisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982. Vol. 3 of Nietzsche. 4 vols.
6. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. England: Penguin Group, 2003.
Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A De-constructive Feminist Reading
By: Brett Collins
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed using poetic aphorisms, sectioned into chapters based on the character Zarathustra's travels. The concept of the book for Nietzsche, was more or less to develop and establish his central ideas to his philosophy, further many regard his philosophy, and specific structural concepts of it that will be analyzed later, as the accumulation of Metaphysics for western philosophy (Heidegger 8). However, these necessary “transcendental signifiers”, and to note binary centers, of his structural philosophical development is something important to regard. Therefore, The first topic that will be explored is the concept of Nietzschean 'will to power' as his centralized “signified” concept for his philosophical statements in the book and the underlying prejudice and its possible deconstruction. Further the philosophy is completely sexist and relates women to illusion and deception, merely appearance. Secondly, the signification of Zarathustra's view of women as riddle and Nietzsche's statement “women as truth”, as both phallogocentric concepts that will be explored later. Both of these soon to be explored components of Nietzsche's thought will show first of all how an initially and seemingly unstructured aphoristic philosophy is structured around nonsensical statements.
The first signified, as in the sign or terminology that denotes a meaning, is called the will to power. This will to power is developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the following passage: “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master”(Nietzsche 137). This is a metaphysical and psychological idea, not a sociological observance, so it subjects living beings to this will to power characteristic, it creates upon humans an imprint of this concept. This is the centricity of his structural philosophy or in other words his “transcendental signified”, which defined is the center and irreplaceable object in his developed structure of metaphysics. One could not remove this transcendental signified without destroying the relativity and “truthfulness by reference” of all the other concepts revolving and relying around it. Much like our sun is the catalyst for life in our solar system, or structure to relate it better to Derrida's terminology. The most important thing to note is that the concept of will to power is only that, a concept. The concept itself is nonsensical because it cannot be proven by empirical evidence, it is simply posited as truth, but the real truth of the term is based entirely on the definition of “will to power” itself and not of practice or observance of the definition in a particular context. Consequently, the value of the statement from Nietzsche is based entirely on the word itself, it has no relation to the world, it is only relative to itself and other structural components of Nietzsche's philosophy. To properly deconstruct this will to power, one must look at the word “trace” as defined by Derrida. Which is the absence of presence, or in better words sensical evidence, within a defined term/signifier or plenitude of terms tied to a structure much like the will to power (Derrida 89). It is best described as a word that is “empty” in a sense. What Nietzsche tries to do, in the passage above is “totalization” which is to posit something as a theory for everything, which is an accumulation of what Derrida called Nietzsche's spurs (Derrida 70). Yet the concept of will to power is a binary concept where it has an opposing concept or a plurality of concepts, subsequently both concepts are not completely polarized. The binary opposite to the trace of will to power is not an isolated opposition, it has a multiplicity of possible concepts. The will can subsequently be the sum of many other possible goals, such as the will to life, the will to truth, and the will to nothingness. All are merely intelligible and broadly generalized concepts that have no grounding in real life, that is to say that they cannot be proven as true. Nietzsche says “All living creatures are obeying creatures” (Nietzsche 137) , which shows that the multiplicities of his trace of the will to power is not a completely lone transcendental signified. The trace of the will to power is inconsistent now with this new statement brought in, because it shows that there is more then one statement posited as true, more then one imprint on living beings. This is where the structure falls apart because the will to power has other assertions that complicate it, it is not so much simply power. The center of the structure of this Nietzschean/Zarathustran philosophy now has two statements to a degree polarized opposites yet both are asserted as universal principles. Both compete for the center of his structure. Since now Nietzchean/Zarathustran philosophy has come to this contention of centrality, there is both the assertion that “all living beings are obeying beings” and “where I found a living creature, I found the will to power”. This is where the concept of “play” comes in. Play is the “absence of transcendental signified as limitless of play”(Derrida 50), which is to say that once the center or transcendental signified has been uprooted as we have seen happen through the contention between these two statements the rules for the structure of Nietzsche's philosophy become unbound by the deconstruction of his statement of the will to power. So now the statements that were “true by reference” to the will to power center now can have a multiplicity of meanings, they are no longer part of a machined system. Much like a game, where without the objective of the game the rules become subjective and subsequently lost in disorder. This consequently leads to a destruction of meaning for the units, or other statements made, within Nietzsche's structure because they become empty statements without a centralized cause to refer back to. So picture the center, which is the will to power, as the cause and the other concepts in the philosophy as effects that now have no cause to refer back to determine their origin. Further, the linguistic discrimination comes in to play when one posits the “power” concept as greater then the the other multitude of wills. The deconstruction analysis of Nietzsche's metaphysical statement is successful, but it does not necessarily mean the structure is meaningless and that Nietzsche is wrong, it simply means that one cannot use the structure or belief system without acknowledging that it is flawed, inconsistent and therefore in no sense of the word “true” to reality. Now take the word “power” , the word power is related to progress, to action, to be in control, and further has a European origin, more specifically French with the development of the word “pouair”(Harper) , which defined is “to be able”. The development of this word through European origins, up until the middle eighteenth century wherein it became known “power” as we understand it today(Ibid). The relativeness of this words origin and development being mainly European, is a large part of its relation to the way it is used in Nietzsche's work. Nietzsche was discriminatory against women, but for now one only has to concern themselves with the origin and development of the word, and also the context in which the final stages of the word power was defined. The eighteenth century was the beginning of the enlightenment movement, which was lined fashionably with the concept of reason. Reason in this movements sense is a derivative of the concept put forth by the word logos in ancient greek, which is defined as reason and discourse(Aristotle 311). The association between the words and the society the words developed within is also correlated by the degree of subordination of women in both societies. Male's are viewed in ancient Greece and the enlightenment period as the carriers of reason, and women are seen as emotion and irrationality. The reason this is important is because it sets the stage for the second idea brought forth in Nietzsche's texts which is the idea of his structure and the center will to power, as phallogocentric.
Zarathustra discusses women in a chapter titled “Of Old and Young Women”. The first thing he says is that “one should speak about women only to men”(Nietzsche 91) which opens up his idea that everything is defined by the masculine, subsequently feminine is defined by that which is absent in masculinity. He then goes on to state that “everything about women is a riddle and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy”(ibid). First off in this excerpt he shows that women for himself is a riddle, and if one looks to the introduction to his book Beyond Good and Evil he says “Supposing truth to be a woman – What?”(Derrida 55). This shows that he views the feminine as both truth and riddle, a subsequent illusionary truth, which truth is synonymous with appearance. He goes on in this passage and says women's solution is pregnancy, the one thing that men are incapable of doing is defined as the feminine solution. Again, we see the feminine being defined by the limitations of the masculine. Immediately afterwards in this chapter Nietzsche says “For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child. But what is the woman for the man?”(ibid) he then states that men want two things: danger and play which women are for Nietzsche, the most dangerous plaything(ibid). So one can see the process of defining femininity as that which masculinity does not encompass. Also, one can see that Nietzsche's concept of truth and appearance are synonymous and that women for him is defined by these and therefrom is also defined as a riddle of truth and appearance. Afterwards Zarathustra goes on to say that “The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's happiness is: He will” (Nietzsche 92). Once again we see the female defined by the terms and limitations the male defines himself by. This shows a fear from the masculine regarding the feminine for Nietzsche, the fear of castration in the phallogocentric sense because when women begin to become scholars, and accepted into intellectual fields, it destroys the concept that the masculine with the phallic idol is reason and depth, and the women is emotion and shallow with envy of the phallic idol. This is the binary opposite that Nietzsche views in the gender roles. One can see this binary opposite herein further: “Woman's nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters”(ibid). There lies the emotion and shallow changeable surface – appearance in a nutshell. Then he describes man as: “But a man's nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it”(ibid). Now one can see that woman is also defined in nature by her incomprehension of the masculine nature, one sees femininity in this light as a reflexive image of what the male wants. This view of women as shallow and changeable, as mere appearance dates back to Platonic concepts wherein man is depth, the unchangeable, and women is shallow image, these were polar opposites in Plato's work. Platonic concepts were transformed into the divine from the metaphysical, unchangeable, and the image remained as earthly, which can be seen as the binary opposite influencing religions post ancient Greece. So now we have the development of the masculine as divine reason and the woman as earthly, the rupture between the gender roles continues to be pulled apart by these new transformations of gender through historical times. If Nietzsche was and is an epoch in thinking, then we see this sexism of Nietzsche's as the conglomeration of sexism from ancient Greece to the modern age. And the fear is the same thing, the fear of woman's individualism transpiring to bloom is shown in these passages as the accumulation in males of fear of the masculine intellectual castration, so the male intellectual subordinates women out of fear of disrupting the binary opposites, which for men is the possession of the phallic reason. Nietzsche's writings are far away from a center of reason, yet the sexism remains closely tied to that sphere of the logos.
The types of accumulations of western metaphysics and philosophy found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra are amazing concepts for the fields of study, yet with opinion comes prejudice and the prejudice of women becomes apparent in the chapter discussed. The whole book talks about man as progress and masculinity as the human embodiment of divinity when “god is dead”(Nietzsche 41). His literary opinion of women is just an extension in modern European thought of the already existing intellectual subordination of women. With the acknowledgement of these binary opposites regarding male and female nature within his work one can deconstruct, as we have, the underlying prejudice. The will to power, women as truth, women as riddle, and happiness for women as the observance of male will found in the book are all discriminatory allusions to an ancient and continuing suppression of the female spirit.
Works Cited
1. Derrida, Jacques. Spurs. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1979.
2. ---. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins U P, 1976.
3. Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. England: Penguin Group, 2004.
4. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary. November, 2001. October 9, 2006. <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=power>
5. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Fransisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982. Vol. 3 of Nietzsche. 4 vols.
6. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. England: Penguin Group, 2003.