I wanted to pull together my thoughts on your first attempts at posting and on our discussion/analysis of Nietzsche. The posts were good for the most part–the vast majority were high “2” and above in terms of our rubric, which is great for the initial try. Here are some persistent problems or misperceptions I noticed:

HERESY #1: Some authors misread N, thinking that N argues that humans have fallen, in effect, from a Golden Age in which language and concepts were closer to reality. This is not the case: for N the subjective (language and concepts) and the objective (the world of things, what Kant calls the Ding an sich or the “thing in itself) are utterly separate and have always been.

HERESY #2: Others argued that N was criticizing the hypocrisy of those who lie, flatter, dissimulate, etc. in their interpersonal dealings and thus, implicitly, urging us to greater sincerity and truth. He does feint in this direction by scorning those who lie and soothe themselves with fake “truths,” but the main thrust of the argument is to abolish the truth/lies binary altogether and think about concepts/language in a radically different way, as a building material that make realities rather than a mirror that reflects preexisting reality.

Beyond correcting heresies, I wanted to point out one aspect of the text that we perhaps didn’t emphasize enough in class. Sure, it’s a bummer that all our “truth” is founded on rushing water and metaphor. But N insists that there’s a way to embrace this fact in ways that are optimistic. When he claims that humans are “architectural geniuses,” he voices the concern that we end up using our “reason” to hem ourselves in “prison houses” of language, but he also imagines creative uses of language/concepts/science that liberate us:

That enormous structure of beams and boards of the concepts, to which the poor man clings for dear life, is for the liberated intellect just a scaffolding and plaything for his boldest artifices. And when he smashes it apart, scattering it, and then ironically puts it together again, joining the most remote and separating what is closest, he reveals that he does not need the emergency aid of poverty, and that he is now guided not by concepts but by intuitions. From these intuitions no regular road leads to the land of ghostly schemata, of abstractions. The word is not made for these intuitions; man falls silent when he sees them, or he speaks in sheer forbidden metaphors and unheard of conceptual compounds, in order at least by smashing and scorning the old conceptual barricades to correspond creatively to the impressions of the mighty present intuition.

This is pure “Man of Intuition,” reveling in the deconstructive play of dismantling culture and putting it back together. It’s Charlie Parker inventing bebop by deriving melodies from the upper harmonic registers of the musical chart; it’s Gertrude Stein using words like cubists used the canvas; it’s activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement taking over urban space and making it serve radically new functions; it’s Marcel Duchamp plunking a urinal in an art gallery and signing it “R. Mutt” (> German, Armut, “poverty”).

The best responses moved quickly from the basic argument that language/concepts are arbitrary and metaphorical and that there’s no such thing as truth. These authors pushed into the latter aspects of the argument that wrestle with the implications. Melissa G, for example, wrestles with the binary of “reason” v “intuition” at the end. Melissa M does a nice job of “playing through the pain” and speculating on aspects of the argument that she candidly admits not fully grasping: this is what we should all do with our writing! Anna attacks the argument from her own standpoint as an economist, insisting on the primacy of reason, even if it has a metaphorical basis.

Two posts get special kudos for covering the long arc of the argument with sophistication, even in the limits of short posts. Ashley’s wrestles with the more positive moments of N’s argument, and Eric’s gives a gorgeous reading that uses other literary texts (from Orwell and Dostoevsky) to drive the point home.

I don’t call out these particular posts to demand that everyone copy them in a cookie-cutter way: none of them is perfect (whatever that means), but each of them offers something positive that many students struggled with, so I give them to you to refine your sense of the kind of thinking/writing you can do in this space.

If you’re disappointed by your provisional “grade,” don’t fret: there’s lots of time to improve, and I put a heavy thumb on the scale for those who produce better and better work as the semester develops.