This is Reading for Pleasure Wednesday and I have little new to report since I am still reading The Black Insider, very slowly.
Logic is an attitude. It freezes us forever in the icy tumult of all the cursed attitudes they stuffed into us. But even where thoughts have died, something ghostly lingers behind. An illumination, a show pregnant with astonishment. As it were a notion of transcendence. Otherwise there would be such a stink of dead and rotting thoughts that the living could not think new thoughts. Think of all the thoughts that are dead since the time man grew tired of his gills and fins and stood up on his hind legs to make the handaxe that would prove to all the other evolving forms of life that he alone was sapiens. Straightforward things leave no room for the imagination; they allow no other perspectives. The tyranny of straightforward things is more oppressive and more degrading than such idle monstrosities as life and death, apartheid and beerdrinking, a stamp album and Jew-baiting. One plus one equals two is so irrefutably straightforward that the unborn child can see that even if man was wiped off the face of the earth one plus one would always and forever equal two. (37)
In one of my courses we are studying Heart of Darkness this week, so I am rereading it. It should not count for this post since I am reading it for work and the point of Reading for Pleasure Wednesday is to read outside the work menu. Still I feel as though I were reading Conrad for pleasure. And I have added to this year’s must-read list Balzac’s Le Colonel Chabert.
Finally, from a friend I have just received this book, on self-improvement of all things, and it actually looks interesting. It looks, in fact, like much of what I write against the poor logic and self-flagellation of Reeducation, which is why my friend sent it to me. I notice, though, that the author also has this book, which I may actually want. It might help me organize better, in a non-linear way, my sprawling research program.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
On HD, I am wondering what the deal is. The whites cannot face the Other, nor can they face what they themselves are doing. Is this bourgeois idealism of some sort? It reminds me of my Reeducator.
I’d have to read it again, but it might come down to the master-slave dichotomy. Maybe it is not so much Hegel’s (original) dichotomy but Batailles’ reinterpretation of it, though. The masters act but there is no self knowledge in their actions, since they are not bounded by any metaphysical absolutes (they fear not death and thus are psychologically and spiritually unbounded). It is the slaves who understand the meaning of their actions (their own and the masters’) since they are tied to concrete reality by their own fear of death.
Don’t know, though. Just throwing something out there.
Unbounded. One of my students has a journal entry about this – interesting – perhaps I should post it.
Hm. So the masters project their lack of self knowledge, their unboundedness, onto the natives, do you think?
Well, to hazard a guess — what the masters have is self discipline or a proportionally greater faculty of what Nietzsche calls “will” than does the subjugated group (who, with this extra amount of determination — to mingle Nietzche with Hegel — would rise up risking life and limb in order not to be subjugated. This is the meaning of the indifference to death of the masters who say, “rather die than submit”. Of course, the lcak of material abilility, ie. weapons to rise up is certainly not factored in, here.) But maybe what happens to the masters (who are — to be quite clear NOT the capitalist masters of today, who have risked not their lives to be where they are. The masters in this instance are primal, rather.) … what happens to the masters post-Plato is that they confuse their power with knowledge. That is because of Plato’s (and hence generally our–) notion that knowledge = power = the good. That is to say, the masters want to be considered as those who represent The Good, and so they take themselves to be knowledgeable and therefore powerful — rather than merely powerful.
Anyway, what they mistake in the slave as a lack of knowledge is very often only a lack of power – a lack of the means (whether in the Hegelian, primal sense this is “will” –as applies to this day to the workslave — or whether it is something more akin to lacking weapons.)
To clarify:
If your ethos is that of a Barbarian, you would certain encounter death before you encountered meaningful opposition to your ideology. That is a hindrance to learning and to knowledge.
The paradoxical condition of the “slave” is that he or she can in fact encounter knowledge due to his or her resistance to death. Specifically, the very boundedness of the slave (a limitation linked directly to fear of death) ties him or her to the material world and to a context that is automatically limited and inescapable — and therefore opens up avenues to knowledge
Yes except that this doesn’t seem to apply to actual colonial situations or actual slavery, where you have resistance, rebellions, and do on from day one and continuing, and where the vanquished do not not have knowledge, and so on … it all seems to be something Nietzche, Hegel, etc. imagine and perhaps to have more to do with their own (Whiteman!) power issues than with the world or history.
For Conrad, this certainly works: “The masters act but there is no self knowledge in their actions”
and also this:
“…what happens to the masters post-Plato is that they confuse their power with knowledge. That is because of Plato’s (and hence generally our–) notion that knowledge = power = the good. That is to say, the masters want to be considered as those who represent The Good, and so they take themselves to be knowledgeable and therefore powerful — rather than merely powerful.
Anyway, what they mistake in the slave as a lack of knowledge is very often only a lack of power …”
I don’t understand / know Hegel / Nietzche as well as I might but my impression is, they share Marlow’s limitations in the end. I’d understand this better if I applied it to something like my family’s attitude toward work (they take the slave role, and sometimes the master role, and I’ll bet I’d understand a lot if I thought about it in relation to them, but they unlike Conrad’s natives exist fully within the West)…
Anyway I don’t know either, I am just musing…
Well Hegel was on my mind because of Achille Mbembe’s mocking of the colonial application of Hegel. Apparently, there is a Hegelian basis for seeing the natives as being on the level of animals. So yeah, apparently Mbembe was making the same point about the limitations of Western philosophical thinking.
I think that — like I was kind of half-suggesting — the hidden limitation on the Hegelian dialectic is the material one: that is, the having or not having of weapons and training and education, etc. But this material oversight (or apparent one, from my perspective) is due to Hegel and Nietzsche both being more or less philosophical Idealists. They seem to condense the issue of power and powerlessness to a matter of will. Be this as it may be, they can still offer insights. The important thing is not to assume (a very common and deplorable mistake these days) that they are talking about morality when they talk about power or powerlessness. The relationship between being moral and having power is anything but equivalent. Rather, in the case of both Hegel and Nietzsche, the issue is that a human being is both a mixture of having power AND of being powerless. (One has will, in the first case, but one must also have knowledge, as per the second case.)
But where these idealists have a point is that they can see that there is a consequence — taking you “beyond morality” — when you choose not to fear death but to confront it. (And yet — as we can see from history, those who have the courage of their will are not necessarily more moral human beings. Just humans of a different sort.)
I see (and I also so see how useful it is to have training in philosophy, but this is a tangential rant – to be fooling with current literary and cultural theory correctly, one really needs a serious philosophical background).
It’s funny — I spent many years online trying to teach myself philosophy. You know how it is when you are trying to be self-educated — you compare your own experiences to what you’re reading and try to make sense of the text in that way. This can be an effective way of learning up to a point. the problem is that it only takes you up to a point — because your learning is dependent upon the historical and personal contingencies of your own experiences and understanding of them up to that point in your life.
Anyway, having made a few more jolts towards intellectual maturity of late, I look back to what many of those on the various philosophy lists (especially the Nietzsche ones) were discussing, and I see how clearly they had three-quarters missed the point of what they thought they understood.
The problem is the influence of their own cultural perspectives, which almost entirely draw a curtain over their eyes. For example, it is not the case that Nietzsche celebrates “mastery” over “slavery” in quite the one-sided and undialectical way that people think. (This is a twentieth century dichotomy and bifurcation.) Rather, according to Nietzsche it is necessary to have in internal dialectic between the “master” within one and the “slave” within one. Apart from this no experience is possible — least of all “self overcoming”.
But you really need to go to Hegel to see how much this is true. Those who are Pure masters (if such a thing could exist) would be pure spirit. At least this is my understanding (probably extrapolating quite a bit from Hegel). What I mean is that if you are purely a master, you have no fear of death, and hence no sensibility. If you hurt yourself, you do not recoil to discover the meaning of that hurt, because ultimately hurt is only a smaller version of death — but you are not afraid of death!! —-This is why Nietzsche said that the masters are stupid, whereas the slaves are shrewd. Those who fear death have an interest in developing knowledge to provide a bulwark against death. Hence we have medicine, the notional idea of military intelligence (at least) and we make predictions and plan for the future. All of this is “slavish” –(and as Bataille points out, taken in an absolute sense, it martyrs the present to the future) but so long as we maintain a balance, a certain amount of “slavishness” is necessary and appropriate as what is means to be civilised.
But you can see how the young boys who read Nietzsche have an emotional and reflexive reaction to the word, “slave”. They freak out — God bless them — and determine to become “masters”. But this is all at the level of a connotative misreading of what Nietzsche is humorously trying to say. But the young 20th century boys are severe — and no more severe than they are simple.
So you have this problem. Philosophical knowledge does take a long time to develop — but mostly because so much stands in the way.
Yes – and to say something good for once about my X, I did figure this point out about Nietzche by listening to him.
Where I’m not sharp and would like to be sharper is in being able to see / say things like “that’s an idealist argument” in the blink of an eye, and to know more technical definitions of things like morality and ethics than I do. Not to mention, to know formal logic!!!
Yeah, but you know that like the reflexes 0f the boxer, these are essentially honed by practice. I think that reflection on one’s life experiences — although not enough in itself — is also fundamental.