Friday, August 16, 2013

Pain, Creator, Creature

Nietzsche, in #225 of Beyond Good and Evil, defends Pain as necessary to the self-discipline that is a means to personal enhancement.  Now, on his analysis, self-discipline is administered by a part of the self that he calls "creator", on a part that he calls "creature", which are juxtaposed as "form-giver" and "material".  However, two other examples of the form-giver-material relation with which he is surely familiar are conductor-orchestra and director-cast, neither of which requires the infliction of pain in order to succeed.  So, the justification of Pain that he presents in this passage is potentially self-undermining.

No comments:

Post a Comment