What did Nietzsche mean by “decadence”? Has the culture become decadent?

The short answer is that decadence, for Nietzsche, is being drawn to what is bad for you.

Acting effectively requires self-confidence, great passion to achieve one’s aim, and unity of purpose. To be very successful, and certainly to achieve anything truly great, all of one’s abilities and all aspects of one’s personality must be devoted to achieving one’s aim.

This requires self-mastery, by which Nietzsche means the ability to cultivate one’s drives, desires, and abilities in ways that maximize their contribution to one’s project. Self-mastery is not achieved by conscious deliberation alone; it is an “instinctive” ability to do what is good for you. Faced with a choice, one with self-mastery will identify the best course of action without needing to deliberate.

He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. He collects instinctively from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he leaves much behind. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. (Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise” §2.)

The decadent, on the other hand, chooses what is bad for him, again in a largely non-deliberative way. A decadent or “corrupt” person instinctively seeks out that which harms him.

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What did Wittgenstein mean when he said that if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him?

This is a much-discussed aphorism (Philosophical Investigations II 190), and even now Wittgenstein scholars differ over how it should be interpreted. But everyone can agree that its meaning depends crucially on what Wittgenstein means by understanding (verstehen).

Here’s what he says about that in Philosophical Investigations §§531–532:

We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.)

In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions.

Then has “understanding” two different meanings here? – I would rather say that these kinds of use of “understanding” make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding.

For I want to apply the word “understanding” to all this.

At one level, understanding means grasping the general meaning of an expression. At this level, “I’m going to walk the dog” and “I’m going to take the dog for a walk” mean the same thing. If you heard someone (call her Alice) use either expression under the right circumstances, you’d be justified in forming the expectation that she would soon walk the dog. You’ll have understood her well enough to predict her behavior.

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Men Without Art

What would life be like without art?

One answer to the question is that it would be like the life of an animal.

The human mind is distinctive in that we have “meta-beliefs”: beliefs about our beliefs, such as that a belief is true or false. We also have meta-desires: we desire our desires to be appropriate, and we are sometimes concerned that our emotional reactions are inappropriate. We are not merely conscious, we are self-conscious. We not only know things, we know that we know them.

It’s impossible to be certain, but so far as I can tell my cat isn’t conscious in this way. When she forms the belief that a mouse is within striking distance, she doesn’t ask herself how she knows that her belief is true. She just knows that a mouse is near. And she certainly doesn’t ask herself whether she has a right to attack the mouse. She simply pounces when the opportunity arises, without any moral deliberation at all. Continue reading →

What does Foucault mean when he says “do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth … use political practice as an intensifier of thought”?

The passage reads in full:

Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

The quotation is taken from Foucault’s preface to the American translation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which appeared in 1977.

Although the preface purports to be (and to some extent is) a summary of the ethical and political “message” of Anti-Oedipus, it’s really a statement of Foucault’s own attitude at the time. And it’s an elegant bit of prose, all the more effective for being so much more intelligible than the book that follows. I’m willing to bet that most readers recall Foucault’s preface more clearly than anything else in Anti-Oedipus.

As for what it means, that’s best seen in contrast to the view Foucault opposes.

Before the “five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years” of 1965–70, Foucault writes, political thought on the left in France was dominated by Marx and, to a lesser extent, Freud. But the self-proclaimed liberators of humanity inspired by these figures turned out to be disasters. They were the “sad militants” of the Communist Party (“bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of the truth”), the “technicians of desire” (psycho-analysts and psychiatrists who wanted to get everyone’s desires back to “normal”), and the fascists – not the “historical” fascists but rather “the fascism in us all, the fascism that causes us to love power.” Continue reading →

“Bodies”

Michel Foucault wrote about power as if it were an autonomous and automatically functioning machine. To see the world through Foucault’s eyes is to become aware of strategies, deployments, distributions, apparatuses, spaces, adjustments, divisions, and separations, but no persons. Instead, human beings are described as “bodies.” (In The History of Sexuality vol. 1, sexuality is treated as a matter of “bodies and pleasures.”) In hundreds of pages on the topic of power, Foucault almost never mentions the other ways citizens of liberal democracies ordinarily influence their government – by means of political parties, elections, lawmaking, and debate.

The effect is to establish a climate of somewhat spurious objectivity. But it also puts readers on edge. There’s something creepy about this way of talking about power. What?

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Jacques Derrida – Nihilist?

Derrida was certainly accused of nihilism. When “deconstruction” surprisingly made the mainstream news in the late 1970s and early 80s this was a commonly heard charge. I recall laughing with friends when Time (or was it Newsweek?) ran a picture of Derrida’s fellow-deconstructor Paul de Man above the label “nihilist,” presented as straightforwardly as if he were being identified as a Democrat or a Republican.

Why were Derrida and deconstruction newsworthy? In part because newspapers and magazines used to rely on the antics of humanities professors to fill a column or two when the real news was slow. For many years the New York Times had a ritual of listing the titles of panels at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. No comment was required; the titles were self-parodying.

But another reason – and this explains the great deconstruction scare – concerned the old Socratic question of whether a philosopher’s teachings were corrupting the youth. It seemed that students were learning that there was no such thing as meaning, that aesthetic value was an ideological illusion, and ultimately that nothing was true – there were only falsehoods that were mistaken for truths.

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A Post-Collegiate Gap Year


It was an academic year, 1979–80, but I wasn’t a student. I graduated from the University of California, Irvine in June 1979 and drove a Volkswagen van to New York City, where I lived in Manhattan until July 1980 with no responsibilities whatsoever.

I spent a few weeks getting settled. I parked the van in front of a building in Morningside Heights and hauled my belongings up to my temporary apartment. They consisted of books, records, a stereo, an IBM Selectric typewriter, a signed lithograph by Roy Lichtenstein, and a modest wardrobe.

The next morning I looked out the window and saw that the van was gone. The police told me that it was probably taken by some kids and burned. When I asked why they would do that the cops looked at me as if I were an idiot for failing to understand that they had nothing better to do.

The van had served its purpose; I’d planned on selling it anyway. (My father, who had paid for it, said in his wry way that he would “absorb the loss.”) In a few weeks I found an apartment at Broadway and 111th, one block down from Tom’s Restaurant of Seinfeld fame and a few blocks from Columbia University.

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Kubrick’s Style: Neoclassical Modernism

Stanley Kubrick’s visual style can be characterized by thinking about how Ezra Pound described Imagism. “An image,” he said, “is an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Among Pound’s instructions to poets are the imperatives “to employ always the exact word” and “to produce a poetry that is hard and clear.” F.S. Flint added the admonishment “to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.” Pound likened the ideal poetic line to the musical phrase, and held that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry.”

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What does Nietzsche mean by this: “To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions of morality?”

As he often does, Nietzsche omits a premise required by his syllogism, leaving to the reader the task of filling it in.

Let C = admitting a belief because it is a custom, let DCL = being dishonest, cowardly, and lazy, and let M = morality. Nietzsche’s observation takes this form:

If C, then DCL.
If DCL, then M.

Obviously, we’re missing a premise:

If M, then C.

By morality, Nietzsche seems to have in mind beliefs, values, and practices that are adhered to merely because it’s customary to do so. This is contrary to the leading principle of the Enlightenment, according to which something should be done only if it is rational to do it.

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What did Gilles Deleuze mean by “multiplicities”?

In thinking about any aspect of Deleuze’s work it’s helpful to keep in mind his overall motivation: he aspired to a fully naturalistic and materialist metaphysics, one that would adequately embody the modern scientific worldview and extend it to the entire field of human action. He seems to have believed that this required that normative concepts (ideas about how things ought to be, such as justice and morality) be completely purged from accounts of human phenomena. To accomplish this, Deleuze re-described political, economic, psychological, linguistic, and moral phenomena in terms and concepts taken from physics, chemistry, the earth sciences, and dynamics (especially self-assembly, self-organization, and chaos theory).

Many philosophers are naturalists of one sort or another, but most don’t want to simply do away with normative concepts. Instead the idea is to find ways of understanding the normative world (the world of reasons) that are consistent with the naturalistic explanations of science (the world of causes), without abandoning the sense most of us have that human behavior cannot adequately be described without recourse to concepts of justification, responsibility, obligation, and the like. Deleuze dissented from this view in an especially relentless, uncompromising, and highly original and imaginative way. Continue reading →