Philosophy, Writing, Fiction

Modern Philosophy is fictionalized from the outset.  Descartes is not sitting in front of a fire, reflecting on sense-experience, until only Cogito remains.  He is at a desk, with a writing implement in hand, setting down words intended for others to read.  Whether or not the latter comes to pass remains at that moment uncertain.  Thus, Bacon's formulation of principles of Experimentalism is more veridical as an act of immediate reflection, though Locke's, and his successors', eventual attribution of immediacy to a Sense-Datum is not.  So, the comedy described in The Gay Science #1 applies to not only some Moralists, but to all Philosophers who formulate Foundationalist principles that abstract from the immediacy of a corporeal act of writing designed for others to read, which, in the era of Gutenberg, might even be a universal audience.  Thus, the fictional Zarathustra, a character in a book "for all and for no one", is the prototype of a Philosophical Subject, though Writing does not become explicit for Nietzsche until later.  So, evidence that the Moralist, functioning as a medium for a Species drive, is a propagator of Individualist fiction, is plainer than Nietzsche seems to realize in The Gay Science #1.  Likewise, even though his phrase 'human, all too human' signifies a deflation of pretensions, given the indispensability of the uniquely versatile thumb to the act of writing the words, it also expresses the Evolutionary development of the species.