Saturday, October 12, 2013

Will to Power, Writing, Communication, Analytic Philosophy

The Will to Power appears in Nietzsche's oeuvre variously as a theory, a principle, and a doctrine, but, it functions primarily for him as a method of interpretation.  Its implementation consists in a harbinger of what later comes to be called 'psychoanalysis', in which any event is conceived as a product of the motives that generate it.  Consequently, the fundamental locus of the evaluation of an event is its generating motives, so that, two apparently identical events, e. g. two uses of the term 'good', can be distinguished  on the basis of their contrasting motivations, e. g. strength vs. weakness.  Now, unexplored by Nietzsche is one of the more general implications of the method--that encountered, seemingly fixed, entities, are the products of a process of generation, a significant example of which are books.  The Will to Power is thus a reminder, perhaps discomforting to some, that most of what is categorized as 'Philosophy' is written, so, is generated by a process of writing, and, hence, is, fundamentally, a mode of Communication.  In other words, Writing as an artifact encourages the abstraction, from the communicative context, the reification of analytical procedures such as 'theory', 'language', and 'logic', not to mention, 'philosophy' itself, thereby facilitating the reduction of Communication to 'Language', and the study of it to a 'Philosophical Theory', the criterion of which is 'Logic'.  So, one unexamined premise in much of what these days appears under the Analytic Philosophy rubric of 'Philosophy of Language' is not its content, but, the pretension of some of its practitioners that it is a privileged self-subsistent entity, rather than a useful tool.  Likewise, it may be to avoid self-examination that some Analytic Philosophers are dismissive of Nietzsche.

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