Wednesday, August 14, 2013

The Evaluation of Pity

In #293 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggests that "pity" is equivocal--what it denotes in the experience of a "Master" is not what it denotes in the parlance of the common Morality of his era.  If so, then the "revaluation" of Pity that is his stated ambition in The Anti-Christ, is, more properly, a disambiguation.  However, there is no recognition of any terminological confusion in #2 of the latter work, in which he offers some Spinozistic formulations, but without addressing that, for Spinoza, 'pity' is unequivocally defined as harmful to Master and Slave alike.  So, #293 is an example of one of the weaknesses of his aphoristic style--its impact may be only near-sighted and ephemeral..

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