Response to Nietzsche seminar

The Genealogy of Morals being etymological vs. the light cast by etymology for genealogy?

(That was the extent of my notes during the seminar)

The allusion to Descartes in the appeal to collaboration with physiologists, to Rousseau in the plea for an essay prize on the question--which Lea maintains she is not exactly asking, but rather is asking from another perspective. The loneliness of these writers, their solitude and silence, is an element of the way they are unknown to themselves and a method, too of how they (we) seek to get to know themselves. In Plato it is in dialogue, in schools now Socratic method is all the rage, in Kierkegaard the interplay of pseudonyms, and in seminar actual conversation, of a certain kind, the course of which is difficult to track while simultaneously participating in it genuinely, or even to recall with much clarity afterwards. The other extreme of the standardized tests, or a virtuous mean between them and some completely deluded unschooling, rather, a mean which to begin to talk about and analyze will require another shot at Aristotelian, or perhaps Nicomachean, method, the former adjective having been long since discredited by its Scholastic association. Plenty of people are bound to be studying Neo-Thomism nowadays, even so.

Though if I recall my question about the Genealogy Preface and First Essay, I wanted to know, How charitably or how vengefully, ruthlessly, would Nietzsche prefer to be read? With what latitude of interpretation? He seems to be pushing polemical ends and wounding himself on them, to his sadistic anguish and ecstasy, when they turn back on him, inviting like means of reading him--brute force reads, blunt reads: he's a blond beast wannabe; he's martyring himself; he's promoting the Holocaust; he's a Jew, by his own characterization, and to borrow his own borrowed French, par excellence! And an exclamation for good measure. He wants to be beyond evil, but not bad, and beyond good--beyond nouns, or at least personified subjects, projected soul-substances, and perhaps beyond language itself, at least, language that anyone else can understand without 80 pages of exegetical ingenuity per period. Yet intuitively, perhaps, not so difficult to know or understand.

Like Rousseau, or Heracleitus, by one read he undermines his own logic even as he poetically puts forth his arguments that, in some more poetic sense, compel attention, spark inspiration, implore devotion, and raise laughter, sardonic and cheerful, intentional and--who knows, maybe all of it is intentionally funny, by a certain read. But he wants it both ways: it will also deeply wound, if you've read it properly, he tells you in the Preface. If this is to be taken on its face, it's preposterous. By Pullman's eminently British common sense, reading is democratic, and as tyrannical as a writer might be in his study, he has no place telling readers how to read him, or what he means by this or that, or why he matters, or what he's worth--in any other way than in the form of the writing itself.

The writing, its style, its focus, its craft, is great insofar as it does teach without meaning to, without trying--genius, Federer or Homer, is making it look easy, natural--sprezzatura, artful mastery concealing art. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Chaucer--at least they know when they're joking, we want to say, and that it's serious play. The way to learn to write, then, is by reading great writers and consciously, artfully, borrowing, imitating, engaging with them in dialogue, showing the wounded soul you believe to be unique even as you know it is universally shared, even as you doubt it exists. Writing to and with that drive that is never exhaustively named, or you wouldn't write anymore at all, and then invoking the muse even in your silence, listening for a response--that zen abyss of hanging on for the mot just, that echo down the way of the next sentence's rhythm, the outline of the next phrase, the sound of the pen scratching across the paper just softer than hearing, but felt as a texture, a gentle pressure. Of course we are known to ourselves, at least this much.