Thursday, August 22, 2013

Dissonance, Will to Power, Repulsion, Attraction

On the basis of the centrality of Dissonance to Birth of Tragedy, no doubt inspired by Wagner's pioneering use of it, Nietzsche might have developed a Philosophy of Dissonance.  To begin with, as previously proposed here, Dissonance can be defined as a relation between Repulsion and Attraction amongst a plurality of components, a characterization that can be classified as 'descriptive', and/or stipulated as 'normative'.  Now, one advantage of such a principle is that it illuminates an important distinction in the doctrine of the Will to Power that Nietzsche never explicitly recognizes--that between powerful Repulsion and powerful Attraction, though he plainly implicitly entertains it--the resistant loner, and the form-giving conqueror, respectively.  Accordingly, he never systematizes the two expressions of Power, leaving a phenomenon such as the egalitarian aristocracy, to which he alludes in Beyond Good and Evil #259, without an adequate grounding in the Will to Power principle.  In contrast, such an important social configuration can be easily characterized in terms of Dissonance, i. e. as constituted by a relation between independence and cooperation, and, can, perhaps, be judged as an exemplary political arrangement.

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