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Papers by Thomas Steinbuch
Journal of posthumanism, Apr 28, 2024
The study of the city is one of the most challenging topics we explore as philosophers, but it is... more The study of the city is one of the most challenging topics we explore as philosophers, but it is highly rewarding because the city is our most complex cultural artifact and draws in so many aspects of cultural studies. Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (Shaw, 2017), does not disappoint in this respect of revealing how the city is the locus of so much of our neoliberal, and now neocolonial, culture of privilege in forms of classism, racism and genderism, and how the many "others" to these are relegated to the margins of city spaces so that the city becomes a de facto selection tool of sorting these into strata. City spaces are hierarchical, some New York residents, for instance, fit and trim, while away the hours at the ice rink in Rockefeller Center beneath the giant bronze of Prometheus bringing humanity the torch of fire, thus, to signify the divine origins of civilization, whose rise, otherwise inexplicable, is what separates us from animals, as goes the logic. But so many other faceless inhabitants struggle on the margins. Shaw (2017) has written an impressively well researched and nuanced study, approaching the question of the city by contrasting analysis from the many "others" it sets as opposed to itself, which I found very illuminating. The city is revealed by its contrasts to its interpretation of country vacations, for instance, for working and lower middle class but also for the risk takers of adventure, renewing the domination of nature; it is revealed in contrast to cyberspace, of the video game "Grand Theft Auto," and all those many "others" who, by being "othered," reveal its non-inclusive and dominance meaning. Apart from the discussion of Darwinism, which I found questionable, the critical side of the book in tracing the ideology behind the stratification in the city is excellent, but I found the book problematic in its dismissal of utopianism and its rejection of the revolutionary subject in the program of the Posthuman City and in its non-developmental conception of the Posthuman. An earlier study of the culture of the city by Lewis Mumford takes note that our increasing control over the basics of material life at the time of the rise of agriculture and the first cities coincided with a growing anxiety, and that "war and domination…were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city" (Mumford, 1961, 44). Mumford identified the culture of the earliest cities as the culture of authoritarianism, which is today the culture of patriarchy, genderism, classism, and ultimately became the culture of Empire (under Sargon of Akkad), and it is the basic templet that has replicated itself over and over to today, and very precisely so, it may be noted. But how did the culture of the
Philosophy in review, Mar 11, 2020
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
The agonist, May 31, 2023
Brobjer's book 2 is research into the question of the EH to UAW relationship. With impeccable sch... more Brobjer's book 2 is research into the question of the EH to UAW relationship. With impeccable scholarship, the book sets to rights a fact that has not come to proper acknowledgement in later Nietzsche studies, and that is that Nietzsche wrote EH to be the introduction to The Revaluation of All Values; he wrote a Hauptwerk and EH is the introduction to it and EH was not written as merely instrumental in paving the way for it. Regrettably, Daniel Conway recently repeated the instrumentalist thesis in his editor's introduction to his collection of essays on The Antichrist, (2019). Brobjer's sections on chapters 2, 3 and 4 documenting that EH is the introduction to UAW are superb; 4.3 on "Destiny" and UAW is most impressive. I agree with everything he says in section 4.4. My critical review must begin with Brobjer's exegesis of the opening of Wise/1, because of the implications for the interpretation of why Nietzsche was in the position to make the revaluation: Nietzsche begins the book and this first chapter, where he gives an idealized description of himself and his psychology, conventionally by briefly mentioning his parents and claims that "this twofold provenance" has formed his lifemaking him both decadent and anti-decadent, (loc. 1349). From Brobjer's report on the opening of Wise/1 it can be inferred that he thinks that the doppelte Herkunft refers to Nietzsche's parents' psychology, one to each, by one a decadent by the other, anti-decadent. The brevity of Nietzsche's mention of his parents is hardly to the point. The statement about his parents is within the scope of a riddle, and while there is mention of two parents in it, there is not mention of two psychologies from them. Sorting the riddle, we see that Nietzsche's second Herkunft has nothing to do with lineage from his mother. Brobjer writes that Nietzsche's reference to his parents follows conventional autobiographical practice of writing about one's parents' psychology, but there are not two psychologies here. By making Nietzsche to be following a convention of presenting the
This work is an investigation of Leibniz's concern with the problems of unity. His concern with t... more This work is an investigation of Leibniz's concern with the problems of unity. His concern with these problems is understood to be central to his metaphysics. His distinction between the unity of the individual as true unity and the unity of the general as a unity only of thought is seen to decisively condition his treatment of the problem of the composition of the continuum., his determination of the being space and time, of number, quality, and relation, and his effort to introduce the scholastic doctrine of substantial forms into post-Cartesian thought. The results of our investigation are: (1) an exposition of Leibniz's division of unity into the modes of unity through itself and unity through aggregation; (2) a determination of what unity is in the case of each of its modes; and (3) an exposition of the relatedness of unity in each of its modes to being. viii
New Nietzsche Studies The Journal of the Nietzsche Society, 2022
Review of Bevis McNeil: Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, currently appearing in New Nietzsche St... more Review of Bevis McNeil: Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, currently appearing in New Nietzsche Studies, volume 11, nos 3&4 pages 2021-2022 pages 156-174
Journal of posthumanism, Feb 28, 2022
My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Ar... more My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Are Sublime from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other related texts from that work. N. introduces the thought of the Dionysian orgy in connection with the work of art, which should be Dionysian art, and in this meaning, the sexual orgy signifies evolution. My paper further attempts to identify art, sex and evolution in the context of evolution out of the mind of domination arguing that here evolution means experiencing freedom and backtracking from rape sex to anonymity in sex. A close reading is made of the psychology of domination in Tennessee Williams' drama A Streetcar Named Desire I present a new interpretation of Mozart's Don Giovanni as a search, however unclearly, for a post human sexuality. I draw on the works of Wilhelm Reich's classics of the literature of the Frankfurt School on the critique of authoritarianism, and interrogate the idea of truthfulness promoted on the far right.
Page 1. A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO Thomas Steinbuch ^ •I • UMVERBHY Page 2. ... A... more Page 1. A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO Thomas Steinbuch ^ •I • UMVERBHY Page 2. ... A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO This One W50R-ES8-W5SZ Page 4. ...
The Agonist
Review of Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysi... more Review of Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysian Versus Christian Values
BACKGROUND: Calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities is a very common pathological ... more BACKGROUND: Calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities is a very common pathological process, which has an independent significance in the development of cardiovascular diseases. There is evidence that development of calcification of the arteries correlates with a mutation of the MGP protein gene representing by the Thr83Ala polymorphism. AIM: The purpose of the study was to analyse the connection of Thr83Ala polymorphism of the MGP gene with the development of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. METHODS: The study involved 80 patients. Half of them had signs of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. The allelic Thr83Ala polymorphism of the MGP protein gene was determined by polymerase chain reaction, establishing the presence of calcification of the arteries by radiological and dopplerographic methods. RESULTS: The study aimed to analyse the association of the Thr83Ala polymorphism of the matrix Gla protein gene with the development of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. The data obtained suggest that the replacement of threonine by alanine in the 83rd position of the MGP molecule can affect the functional properties of the protein and in particular its anticarcinogenic properties. Although there was no difference in the distribution of different variants of the genotype by Thr83Ala to the MGP gene polymorphism in patients with CA and healthy patients, but in the distribution of genotypes in the comparison groups separated by sex, it was found that in women, carriage of the Ala allele in a homozygous state is a factor, which protects the development of arterial calcination in the elderly and senile. CONCLUSION: Differences in the distribution of different variants of the genotype according to Thr83Ala to the polymorphism of the MGP gene between patients with CAD and healthy patients do not exceed the limits of statistical significance. In the distribution of genotypes in the comparison groups divided by sex, it was found that in women the carrier of the Ala-allele in the homozygous state is a factor that prevents the development of Menkeberg arteriosclerosis in the elderly and old age.
Hypatia, 1993
Kate Miliett's book, The Loony-Bin Trip, is an extraordinary account of her personal experien... more Kate Miliett's book, The Loony-Bin Trip, is an extraordinary account of her personal experience with involuntary psychiatric commitment. The drama of her conflict with professional psychiatry is so tense, so enraging, that one is likely to find oneself having to set the book aside from time to time just to calm down.
Journal of Posthumanism
My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Ar... more My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Are Sublime from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other related texts from that work. N. introduces the thought of the Dionysian orgy in connection with the work of art, which should be Dionysian art, and in this meaning, the sexual orgy signifies evolution. My paper further attempts to identify art, sex and evolution in the context of evolution out of the mind of domination arguing that here evolution means experiencing freedom and backtracking from rape sex to anonymity in sex. A close reading is made of the psychology of domination in Tennessee Williams’ drama A Streetcar Named Desire I present a new interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a search, however unclearly, for a post human sexuality. I draw on the works of Wilhelm Reich’s classics of the literature of the Frankfurt School on the critique of authoritarianism, and interrogate the idea of truthfulness promoted on the f...
Philosophy in Review, Mar 11, 2020
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
concepts with respect to which thought thinks the many as one are manners of relation. Relation i... more concepts with respect to which thought thinks the many as one are manners of relation. Relation is thus
I live close to my university and I have been taking my meals at the school canteen but it has be... more I live close to my university and I have been taking my meals at the school canteen but it has been shuttered because of COVID-19. Tonight I will make pasta in a double boiler: pasta cooks in the bottom and cherry tomatoes steam on top, served with olive oil. Not too shabby! The students are still in lockdown in the dormitory, going on four months now. I miss Rolande, a young woman from the DRC. “Roland" is a boy’s name, but my young woman friend Rolande, spelt with an “e”, was named after the famous hero of Roncesvalles even so, she tells me. I wish she could come for dinner again, and if only I had some Asiago cheese like I saw at Lille this summer to go with my pasta. I’ve been thinking like this a lot these days.
In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, th... more In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, the author dispels the long-standing impression that Ecce Homo is an irrational book in which the madness that claimed Nietzsche only months after he began writing it had already begun its work. Ecce Homo, it is alleged, is not egotistical, or narcissistic, or megalomaniacal. It is not a work of madness. In his linear exposition of this first chapter, the author presents Nietzsche's revelation of the tragic fact that his very aliveness was in a state of being overwhelmed, consumed, by powerful unconscious emotion, the condition he called decadence. Nietzsche's madness may have caused him to lose perspective on the meaning of having dwelt in "a world of exalted and delicate things," as he writes of himself in Ecce, but the original experience of elevation that comes of an abundance of life, of a surplus of life, certainly was not pathological.
The Agonist
The specific focus of this paper is exegesis of the critique of pity in AC 2-7 by means of the au... more The specific focus of this paper is exegesis of the critique of pity in AC 2-7 by means of the autobiographical account in Ecce Homo of the destructive intrusion of pity on him in Wise/4. There he lists three cases of pity's intrusions: into his great destiny, into his solitude of recovering from wounding in (spiritual) warfare, and into his privileged right to a heavy guilt. As we trace these three cases back to their locations in the chapter where they are first introduced, it can be seen that all are cases of his evolution to Mehrleben, thus to make his critique of pity's intrusion the criticism that it vengefully sought to thwart his evolutionary development. He states that his experience from these cases gives him the right to make a generlization about pity. These cases then become the autobiographical foundation of his criticism of pity in AC 7 that it is hostile to life in thwarting evolutionary development. The more general aim of the paper is to fix the relationsh...
; number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich.... more ; number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich. Overview: Professor McNeil has written about the eternal recurrence from the perspective that it is objective cosmology for N (1.5). That position is vulnerable to the criticism that we do not find a proof of the ER in the published works but mostly in the notebooks. The exceptions are two passages from GS (109 and 341) but they are couched in metaphor. McNeil thus turns to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and states that there, in "Vision and Riddle" the metaphor of eternal recurrence is "strengthened and developed into a deductive proof" (99f)." He accepts Paul Loeb's reading that together, "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" contain a prospective memory. Z has a dying prospective memory of the shepherd and the snake that amounts and it shows up in fact in "The Convalescent" and this shows recurrence-awareness and so is a fictional presentation of evidence that the eternal recurrence is objective cosmology. But McNeil's attempt to establish that N intended a deductive proof of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in "Vision and Riddle" fails because the context strongly suggests otherwise, and he does not address it. He does not address Laurence Lampert's commentary on this section in Nietzsche's Teaching that sharply calls the thesis he advances into question, stating: "this chapter seems to go out of its way to mock syllogistic or formal argument as a way of dealing with fundamental questions" (166). It is a scholarly lapse that McNeil does not engage this context, nor Lampert's development of the foregoing critique to which the context of the deduction gives rise. Also in "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" in following Paul Loeb, McNeil would seem to assuming that, having left metaphor behind, there is only one literal reading possible and that is the reading of recurrence-awareness. I will challenge that inference with a different literal reading of recurrence awareness in "Vision and Riddle" and "the Convalescent" from an evolutionary biology perspective as epigenetic evolution of novel mental life, and raise the question of what "is true" might then mean in the statement "the eternal recurrence is true." Along these same lines of establishing that N believed that the eternal recurrence was objective cosmology, McNeil presents the idea in Chapter 2 that Nietzsche found a precedent of his idea of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in the Stoics and Heraclitus, and in that chapter he relies on N.'s notebooks to make his case that the eternal recurrence for N was a cosmological project as it was for the Stoics. Although there is interesting material in Greg Whitlock's translation of N.'s Pre-Platonic Philosophers lectures, they are very early in Nietzsche 1 I would like to thank Professor George Leaman of the PDC and Professor Martha Zapata Galindo for their help with questions about the influence of National Socialism on Heidegger's interpretation of N. Of course, responsibility for the views contained herein is entirely my own.
Journal of posthumanism, Apr 28, 2024
The study of the city is one of the most challenging topics we explore as philosophers, but it is... more The study of the city is one of the most challenging topics we explore as philosophers, but it is highly rewarding because the city is our most complex cultural artifact and draws in so many aspects of cultural studies. Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (Shaw, 2017), does not disappoint in this respect of revealing how the city is the locus of so much of our neoliberal, and now neocolonial, culture of privilege in forms of classism, racism and genderism, and how the many "others" to these are relegated to the margins of city spaces so that the city becomes a de facto selection tool of sorting these into strata. City spaces are hierarchical, some New York residents, for instance, fit and trim, while away the hours at the ice rink in Rockefeller Center beneath the giant bronze of Prometheus bringing humanity the torch of fire, thus, to signify the divine origins of civilization, whose rise, otherwise inexplicable, is what separates us from animals, as goes the logic. But so many other faceless inhabitants struggle on the margins. Shaw (2017) has written an impressively well researched and nuanced study, approaching the question of the city by contrasting analysis from the many "others" it sets as opposed to itself, which I found very illuminating. The city is revealed by its contrasts to its interpretation of country vacations, for instance, for working and lower middle class but also for the risk takers of adventure, renewing the domination of nature; it is revealed in contrast to cyberspace, of the video game "Grand Theft Auto," and all those many "others" who, by being "othered," reveal its non-inclusive and dominance meaning. Apart from the discussion of Darwinism, which I found questionable, the critical side of the book in tracing the ideology behind the stratification in the city is excellent, but I found the book problematic in its dismissal of utopianism and its rejection of the revolutionary subject in the program of the Posthuman City and in its non-developmental conception of the Posthuman. An earlier study of the culture of the city by Lewis Mumford takes note that our increasing control over the basics of material life at the time of the rise of agriculture and the first cities coincided with a growing anxiety, and that "war and domination…were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city" (Mumford, 1961, 44). Mumford identified the culture of the earliest cities as the culture of authoritarianism, which is today the culture of patriarchy, genderism, classism, and ultimately became the culture of Empire (under Sargon of Akkad), and it is the basic templet that has replicated itself over and over to today, and very precisely so, it may be noted. But how did the culture of the
Philosophy in review, Mar 11, 2020
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
The agonist, May 31, 2023
Brobjer's book 2 is research into the question of the EH to UAW relationship. With impeccable sch... more Brobjer's book 2 is research into the question of the EH to UAW relationship. With impeccable scholarship, the book sets to rights a fact that has not come to proper acknowledgement in later Nietzsche studies, and that is that Nietzsche wrote EH to be the introduction to The Revaluation of All Values; he wrote a Hauptwerk and EH is the introduction to it and EH was not written as merely instrumental in paving the way for it. Regrettably, Daniel Conway recently repeated the instrumentalist thesis in his editor's introduction to his collection of essays on The Antichrist, (2019). Brobjer's sections on chapters 2, 3 and 4 documenting that EH is the introduction to UAW are superb; 4.3 on "Destiny" and UAW is most impressive. I agree with everything he says in section 4.4. My critical review must begin with Brobjer's exegesis of the opening of Wise/1, because of the implications for the interpretation of why Nietzsche was in the position to make the revaluation: Nietzsche begins the book and this first chapter, where he gives an idealized description of himself and his psychology, conventionally by briefly mentioning his parents and claims that "this twofold provenance" has formed his lifemaking him both decadent and anti-decadent, (loc. 1349). From Brobjer's report on the opening of Wise/1 it can be inferred that he thinks that the doppelte Herkunft refers to Nietzsche's parents' psychology, one to each, by one a decadent by the other, anti-decadent. The brevity of Nietzsche's mention of his parents is hardly to the point. The statement about his parents is within the scope of a riddle, and while there is mention of two parents in it, there is not mention of two psychologies from them. Sorting the riddle, we see that Nietzsche's second Herkunft has nothing to do with lineage from his mother. Brobjer writes that Nietzsche's reference to his parents follows conventional autobiographical practice of writing about one's parents' psychology, but there are not two psychologies here. By making Nietzsche to be following a convention of presenting the
This work is an investigation of Leibniz's concern with the problems of unity. His concern with t... more This work is an investigation of Leibniz's concern with the problems of unity. His concern with these problems is understood to be central to his metaphysics. His distinction between the unity of the individual as true unity and the unity of the general as a unity only of thought is seen to decisively condition his treatment of the problem of the composition of the continuum., his determination of the being space and time, of number, quality, and relation, and his effort to introduce the scholastic doctrine of substantial forms into post-Cartesian thought. The results of our investigation are: (1) an exposition of Leibniz's division of unity into the modes of unity through itself and unity through aggregation; (2) a determination of what unity is in the case of each of its modes; and (3) an exposition of the relatedness of unity in each of its modes to being. viii
New Nietzsche Studies The Journal of the Nietzsche Society, 2022
Review of Bevis McNeil: Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, currently appearing in New Nietzsche St... more Review of Bevis McNeil: Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, currently appearing in New Nietzsche Studies, volume 11, nos 3&4 pages 2021-2022 pages 156-174
Journal of posthumanism, Feb 28, 2022
My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Ar... more My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Are Sublime from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other related texts from that work. N. introduces the thought of the Dionysian orgy in connection with the work of art, which should be Dionysian art, and in this meaning, the sexual orgy signifies evolution. My paper further attempts to identify art, sex and evolution in the context of evolution out of the mind of domination arguing that here evolution means experiencing freedom and backtracking from rape sex to anonymity in sex. A close reading is made of the psychology of domination in Tennessee Williams' drama A Streetcar Named Desire I present a new interpretation of Mozart's Don Giovanni as a search, however unclearly, for a post human sexuality. I draw on the works of Wilhelm Reich's classics of the literature of the Frankfurt School on the critique of authoritarianism, and interrogate the idea of truthfulness promoted on the far right.
Page 1. A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO Thomas Steinbuch ^ •I • UMVERBHY Page 2. ... A... more Page 1. A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO Thomas Steinbuch ^ •I • UMVERBHY Page 2. ... A COMMENTARY ON NIETZSCHE'S ECCE HOMO This One W50R-ES8-W5SZ Page 4. ...
The Agonist
Review of Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysi... more Review of Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and the Revaluation of All Values: Dionysian Versus Christian Values
BACKGROUND: Calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities is a very common pathological ... more BACKGROUND: Calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities is a very common pathological process, which has an independent significance in the development of cardiovascular diseases. There is evidence that development of calcification of the arteries correlates with a mutation of the MGP protein gene representing by the Thr83Ala polymorphism. AIM: The purpose of the study was to analyse the connection of Thr83Ala polymorphism of the MGP gene with the development of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. METHODS: The study involved 80 patients. Half of them had signs of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. The allelic Thr83Ala polymorphism of the MGP protein gene was determined by polymerase chain reaction, establishing the presence of calcification of the arteries by radiological and dopplerographic methods. RESULTS: The study aimed to analyse the association of the Thr83Ala polymorphism of the matrix Gla protein gene with the development of calcification of the arteries of the lower extremities. The data obtained suggest that the replacement of threonine by alanine in the 83rd position of the MGP molecule can affect the functional properties of the protein and in particular its anticarcinogenic properties. Although there was no difference in the distribution of different variants of the genotype by Thr83Ala to the MGP gene polymorphism in patients with CA and healthy patients, but in the distribution of genotypes in the comparison groups separated by sex, it was found that in women, carriage of the Ala allele in a homozygous state is a factor, which protects the development of arterial calcination in the elderly and senile. CONCLUSION: Differences in the distribution of different variants of the genotype according to Thr83Ala to the polymorphism of the MGP gene between patients with CAD and healthy patients do not exceed the limits of statistical significance. In the distribution of genotypes in the comparison groups divided by sex, it was found that in women the carrier of the Ala-allele in the homozygous state is a factor that prevents the development of Menkeberg arteriosclerosis in the elderly and old age.
Hypatia, 1993
Kate Miliett's book, The Loony-Bin Trip, is an extraordinary account of her personal experien... more Kate Miliett's book, The Loony-Bin Trip, is an extraordinary account of her personal experience with involuntary psychiatric commitment. The drama of her conflict with professional psychiatry is so tense, so enraging, that one is likely to find oneself having to set the book aside from time to time just to calm down.
Journal of Posthumanism
My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Ar... more My paper is a study of art, sex and evolution as they are entwined in the text of On Those Who Are Sublime from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other related texts from that work. N. introduces the thought of the Dionysian orgy in connection with the work of art, which should be Dionysian art, and in this meaning, the sexual orgy signifies evolution. My paper further attempts to identify art, sex and evolution in the context of evolution out of the mind of domination arguing that here evolution means experiencing freedom and backtracking from rape sex to anonymity in sex. A close reading is made of the psychology of domination in Tennessee Williams’ drama A Streetcar Named Desire I present a new interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a search, however unclearly, for a post human sexuality. I draw on the works of Wilhelm Reich’s classics of the literature of the Frankfurt School on the critique of authoritarianism, and interrogate the idea of truthfulness promoted on the f...
Philosophy in Review, Mar 11, 2020
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y ... more Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
concepts with respect to which thought thinks the many as one are manners of relation. Relation i... more concepts with respect to which thought thinks the many as one are manners of relation. Relation is thus
I live close to my university and I have been taking my meals at the school canteen but it has be... more I live close to my university and I have been taking my meals at the school canteen but it has been shuttered because of COVID-19. Tonight I will make pasta in a double boiler: pasta cooks in the bottom and cherry tomatoes steam on top, served with olive oil. Not too shabby! The students are still in lockdown in the dormitory, going on four months now. I miss Rolande, a young woman from the DRC. “Roland" is a boy’s name, but my young woman friend Rolande, spelt with an “e”, was named after the famous hero of Roncesvalles even so, she tells me. I wish she could come for dinner again, and if only I had some Asiago cheese like I saw at Lille this summer to go with my pasta. I’ve been thinking like this a lot these days.
In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, th... more In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, the author dispels the long-standing impression that Ecce Homo is an irrational book in which the madness that claimed Nietzsche only months after he began writing it had already begun its work. Ecce Homo, it is alleged, is not egotistical, or narcissistic, or megalomaniacal. It is not a work of madness. In his linear exposition of this first chapter, the author presents Nietzsche's revelation of the tragic fact that his very aliveness was in a state of being overwhelmed, consumed, by powerful unconscious emotion, the condition he called decadence. Nietzsche's madness may have caused him to lose perspective on the meaning of having dwelt in "a world of exalted and delicate things," as he writes of himself in Ecce, but the original experience of elevation that comes of an abundance of life, of a surplus of life, certainly was not pathological.
The Agonist
The specific focus of this paper is exegesis of the critique of pity in AC 2-7 by means of the au... more The specific focus of this paper is exegesis of the critique of pity in AC 2-7 by means of the autobiographical account in Ecce Homo of the destructive intrusion of pity on him in Wise/4. There he lists three cases of pity's intrusions: into his great destiny, into his solitude of recovering from wounding in (spiritual) warfare, and into his privileged right to a heavy guilt. As we trace these three cases back to their locations in the chapter where they are first introduced, it can be seen that all are cases of his evolution to Mehrleben, thus to make his critique of pity's intrusion the criticism that it vengefully sought to thwart his evolutionary development. He states that his experience from these cases gives him the right to make a generlization about pity. These cases then become the autobiographical foundation of his criticism of pity in AC 7 that it is hostile to life in thwarting evolutionary development. The more general aim of the paper is to fix the relationsh...
; number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich.... more ; number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich. Overview: Professor McNeil has written about the eternal recurrence from the perspective that it is objective cosmology for N (1.5). That position is vulnerable to the criticism that we do not find a proof of the ER in the published works but mostly in the notebooks. The exceptions are two passages from GS (109 and 341) but they are couched in metaphor. McNeil thus turns to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and states that there, in "Vision and Riddle" the metaphor of eternal recurrence is "strengthened and developed into a deductive proof" (99f)." He accepts Paul Loeb's reading that together, "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" contain a prospective memory. Z has a dying prospective memory of the shepherd and the snake that amounts and it shows up in fact in "The Convalescent" and this shows recurrence-awareness and so is a fictional presentation of evidence that the eternal recurrence is objective cosmology. But McNeil's attempt to establish that N intended a deductive proof of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in "Vision and Riddle" fails because the context strongly suggests otherwise, and he does not address it. He does not address Laurence Lampert's commentary on this section in Nietzsche's Teaching that sharply calls the thesis he advances into question, stating: "this chapter seems to go out of its way to mock syllogistic or formal argument as a way of dealing with fundamental questions" (166). It is a scholarly lapse that McNeil does not engage this context, nor Lampert's development of the foregoing critique to which the context of the deduction gives rise. Also in "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" in following Paul Loeb, McNeil would seem to assuming that, having left metaphor behind, there is only one literal reading possible and that is the reading of recurrence-awareness. I will challenge that inference with a different literal reading of recurrence awareness in "Vision and Riddle" and "the Convalescent" from an evolutionary biology perspective as epigenetic evolution of novel mental life, and raise the question of what "is true" might then mean in the statement "the eternal recurrence is true." Along these same lines of establishing that N believed that the eternal recurrence was objective cosmology, McNeil presents the idea in Chapter 2 that Nietzsche found a precedent of his idea of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in the Stoics and Heraclitus, and in that chapter he relies on N.'s notebooks to make his case that the eternal recurrence for N was a cosmological project as it was for the Stoics. Although there is interesting material in Greg Whitlock's translation of N.'s Pre-Platonic Philosophers lectures, they are very early in Nietzsche 1 I would like to thank Professor George Leaman of the PDC and Professor Martha Zapata Galindo for their help with questions about the influence of National Socialism on Heidegger's interpretation of N. Of course, responsibility for the views contained herein is entirely my own.
Although I do not mention Gary Shapiro's 2016 book in this paper, , Nietzsche's Great Earth: Grea... more Although I do not mention Gary Shapiro's 2016 book in this paper, , Nietzsche's Great Earth: Great Events and Great Politics, it was on my mind in writing it because his conversational treatment of the great politics fails to come to grips with the scientific content of this idea as a theory of development. This paper gives substantive meaning to Nietzsche's idea of a great politics to be fought by "single individuals full of worth." These individuals will be bearers of evolutionary development. The shared identity of these individuals will be their shared knowledge that morality is a misinterpretation of declining life and their mutually recognizable acts of will to overcome renunciation and retaliation. Nietzsche's idea of single individual full of worth is an early concept of the Post=Human.
Heidegger and Jaspers both thought that the image of Caesar with Christ's soul captured Nietzsche... more Heidegger and Jaspers both thought that the image of Caesar with Christ's soul captured Nietzsche's idea of the Over-Person. Walter Kaufmann echoed this reading, both in his note to section 983 of the Will to Power, standard edition, and in his book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Their idea seems to be that the figure can validate the idea of the Over-Person as agent in exercising will to power while still Christianizing him by tempering that exercise with compassion -- this despite Nietzsche's extensive and penetrating critique of pity from Dawn on. In Ecce Homo/Wise/5 Nietzsche writes of a god come to earth who bears the guilt rather than the punishment, and in the context of this section, it is clear that Christ's soul "goes under" (one of Nietzsche's recurring images) the mastery of will to power. I read relation as working on an inner plane, not an outer one, and on the inner plane of EH/Wise/5, Christ's soul lies beneath the mastery of the Over-Person's will to power -- just the inverse of the relationship Heidegger and Jaspers declared them to have. The Over-Person is not an outwardly oriented rapacious conqueror dominating the weak but an inner self-conqueror, creating life in him-/her self by mastering the feelings and associated thoughts of retaliation.
A critique of Nehamas' model of Nietzsche's Dankbarkeit as a way of turning bad things into good ... more A critique of Nehamas' model of Nietzsche's Dankbarkeit as a way of turning bad things into good things. It is by force of will to power that I do so, but why? I argue that Nehamas' model fails because he does not understand the agency of will to power as being strengthening life in ourselves against its intimate weaknesses. He has no explanation of why power exercises itself to begin with. There is a deeper level of analysis of will to power than as a force of manipulation and rearrangement as Nehamas has it,
My focus in this paper is on Wise/4, on his remark that pity intruded destructively on him, into ... more My focus in this paper is on Wise/4, on his remark that pity intruded destructively on him, into his privilege to bear a heavy guilt. Wise/5 tells us the sense of bearing a heavy guilt. Pity has no respect for boundaries, and smells of the mob; instead it should feel shame. Nietzsche's moral psychology is difficult, and I was not able in this paper to analyze the psychology of shame as it comes into play in this passage.
Nietzsche branded Rousseau as a "moral tarantula," and rejected his social contract theory. i He ... more Nietzsche branded Rousseau as a "moral tarantula," and rejected his social contract theory. i He writes: "whether power is in the many or the few, the feeling, decided either way, takes an oligarchic or autocratic form." ii The feeling of power figures in Nietzsche's social and political philosophy as well as in his philosophy of evolution. iii In his social and political philosophy he holds that the will is not bound by the moral law when it acts to master lifeweakening thoughts and feelings arising from "the affects of ressentiment." For Nietzsche, the feeling of power over a resistance is happiness, iv and utilitarianism's self-preserving happiness for the greatest number is an assault on the happiness of being in command in an attempt to weaken and cripple life. And in Nietzsche's philosophy of evolution, the feeling of power is the principle of our development as a species in his "great politics" of overcoming the Spirit of Revenge. How does Rousseau's making all wills morally equal accomplish an act of revenge? And what development of ourselves as a species results from the rule of the feeling of power? Nietzsche tells us that in 1879 he arose from a minimum of life and that life became more in him: v "out of my will to life I created life in myself, "ein Mehr" of life; I added life to myself, created a true complement to the life in myself. vi The will to power in life strengthened life in him, mastering his life-weakening resentment. The feeling of power is the feeling of this commanding exercise of strengthened life over the resentment that weakens it. This is what requires privileged rights: "increasingly, I feel myself in opposition to the morality of equality, he writes." vii What could it mean that Nietzsche created life in himself, added life to himself? This is the key idea. He wrote Ecce Homo to answer this question.
A linear commentary on Chapter 1 of Ecce Homo, Why I am So Wise. Twenty years later, I stand by ... more A linear commentary on Chapter 1 of Ecce Homo, Why I am So Wise.
Twenty years later, I stand by the thesis of my book, which is that Ecce Homo contains the key to Nietzsche's philosophy in its disclosure that he created ein Mehr of life in himself by his self-overcoming critique of decadence. He tells us that his decadence came to him from his father. The significant development for my position from then until now is that now we have the science of how that could have happened. We now know thanks to research into epigenetics, that experience is heritable. The brain disease that claimed Ludwig Nietzsche's life almost certainly had an associated epigenetic coding and that coding could have reached Nietzsche by one or another pathway.
* Video Lecture Series on Chapter 1 of Ecce Homo, Why I am So Wise delivered at Hangzhou Foreign ... more * Video Lecture Series on Chapter 1 of Ecce Homo, Why I am So Wise delivered at Hangzhou Foreign Languages School, 2013-2014
Nietzsche at the Jena Psychiatric Clinic for the Care and Cure of the Insane: A Case of Misunders... more Nietzsche at the Jena Psychiatric Clinic for the Care and Cure of the Insane: A Case of Misunderstood Evolutionary Development
by Thomas Steinbuch
What happened to Nietzsche in Turin? What was the nature of his breakdown? Did he even have a mental breakdown in any sense defined by clinical psychiatry? Julian Young concluded that Nietzsche’s breakdown was entirely psychological, having accepted that the cases for syphilis and/or a brain tumor as possible causes have been disproved. According to Young, Nietzsche’s “later Dionysianism” was symptomatic of clinical mania. Mazzino Montinari states that Nietzsche’s Dankbarkeit for his whole life, which he declared in the epigraph to Ecce Homo, gradually became megalomania and casts a backward shadow on Ecce Homo and the late correspondence as Wahnsinnschriften. The thesis of my paper is that at Jena, Nietzsche was still faithful to his project of self-overcoming, which was a project of evolutionary development of ein Mehr of life. The diagnosis of clinical mania does not explain what happened to him.
As is clear from Ecce Homo Wise/4 and 5, for himself, Nietzsche’s program of self-overcoming meant the mastery of the mood disorder of compulsive renunciation and retaliation he inherited from his father. In the focus of current research in evolutionary biology, his self-overcoming can be seen as evolutionary development. Nietzsche’s inherited mood disorder meant that he inherited epigenetic gene regulation for genes controlling hormone levels for some hormones. The epigenetics for his inherited mood disorder could have formed in utero as his father’s deteriorating condition from the brain disease that took his life when Nietzsche was only four years and ten months old could have onset many years earlier and created environmental stress that induced composition or overexpression for those genes. Nietzsche’s self-overcoming was an evolutionary development in the sense of recoding his epigenome to correct the “bad” inheritance from his father. Although Nietzsche did have some kind of breakdown, of course, an inner core of clarity and fidelity to his project remained intact at Jena which we can understand today as evolutionary development, and this complicates interpreting his breakdown in clinical terms.
My documentation is based on the patient records kept on Nietzsche at Jena. The report of April 1, 1889 records Nietzsche’s stating that he achieved his “thoroughgoing redemption.” His thoroughgoing redemption at Jena was the fulfilment of an on-going self-development as per the program of redemption set out in the sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Truth-Seer” and “On Redemption.” Humanity is in limbs and fragments as if on a battle field or butcher’s table, but we can redeem our history by willing recurrence. He has guessed the riddle of his own existence and taught himself the discipline of willing recurrence. A few months earlier, in the last major revision to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche confessed that his mother and sister were still to him his deepest objection to his doctrine of willing eternal recurrence. I believe that at Jena, Nietzsche successfully willed the recurrence of his mother and sister, overcoming the deepest renunciation against them for authorizing his commitment to achieve his thoroughgoing redemption. Mental illness is a myth, as has been argued by Thomas Szasz in America and Félix Guattari in France. We know now that the reality behind the myth is transcriptional regulation of genetic information by chemical management of the enzymes that condense or uncoil DNA to express the genes they hold, and this can be the root cause of psycho-biological problems. These patterns are heritable and reversible. At Jena, by willing the recurrence of his mother and sister Nietzsche reversed the inherited epigenetic markers that were the biogenesis of his mood disorder of renunciation. It explodes the myth of his mental illness that he did so and identifies the Mehr of life he achieved by his thoroughgoing redemption as an evolutionary development instead of as being clinical mania.
Nietzsche’s breakdown was a kind of intellectual suicide in the face of an extended observation of species-level evolutionary stasis. In Neo-Darwinism, species level non-evolution is hard to assess. The effect of selection is adaptation, and Neo-Darwinism treats the concept of adaptation in terms of fitness as an extensional concept in population genetics. But there are other ways to think about adaptation, and Nietzsche’s claim of non-evolutionary stasis is easier to reconstruct in terms of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. For Nietzsche, adaptation is not just survival but the success of life in growing in power against resistances in the environment above and beyond survival. Nature selects for power, and evolution is the development of power. In Nietzsche’s theory, the will to power seeks a resistance in the environment and interprets whether a resistance is equal, as is necessary. Engaging a resistance above or below equal cannot evolve power (and thus the will to power cannot manifest itself as domination). Nietzschean evolution means the development of the psychology of power. As he defines it in The Antichrist, we have the feeling of power growing, the feeling of resistance overcome. We can thus assess whether we are further evolving a psychology of power by observing ourselves. Nietzsche’s Kulturkritik is the extensive observation of evolutionary stasis at the species level as the observation of the psychology of power renunciation, in particular in Humanism’s “morality of equality.” It was truly a horrible visu. He bangs his elbows on the piano discordantly out of tune as only a human being can be out of tune. But in this midst of this nightmare vision, he individually furthered the evolution of a psychology of power in himself, ein Mehr of life, but this was not clinical mania.
But as for Nietzsche’s culminating idea, the idea of Over-Humanity, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis has little to say. Over-Humanity will be a consolidation of the Mehr of life that comes of individual acts of self-overcoming of renunciation. Each ones’ self-created Mehr of life shall bind together with others in a forward inheritance channel to make a new species. Our fragmented state as a species cannot be undone, but it can become an opportunity for mastering the power renouncing psychology that has resulted by willing recurrence. By this argument, Nietzsche’s concept of the Over-Human aligns with some contemporary conceptions of the Posthuman. KEYWORDS: Nietzsche’s Breakdown, Epigenetic Inheritance, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, “morality of equality,” Dionysianism.
Biography
Thomas Steinbuch received his Ph.D in Philosophy in 1981 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. He has published a book on Nietzsche, A Commentary on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, University Press of America, 1994. Recently, he has addressed the New Nietzsche Society, the American Philosophical Association, The World Congress of Philosophy, Beyond Humanism Series Conferences, 6, 7 and 8, and the Sadykov Readings at Kazan Federal University, Russia, Series II and III. His work aims to reconstruct Nietzsche’s theory of evolution in light of the flexibility afforded by the contemporary shift away from gene centrism, externalism and gradualism that dominated the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis that has led to the Extended Synthesis. He is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and University Advisor on Academic Research at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, P.R. China. He co-teaches a course at ZUST, Nietzsche’s Theory of Evolution in Contemporary Focus with Professor Wu Zhihong of the University of Kiel, Germany, and the School of Biological and Chemical Engineering, ZUST. He maintains a blogsite: steinbuchonnietzsche.com, and his papers can be downloaded at http://ZUST.academia.edu/ThomasSteinbuch.
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Review Essay, 2021
Review Essay, Bevis McNeil, Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence. Number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed ... more Review Essay, Bevis McNeil, Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence. Number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich, awaiting publication. Overview: Professor McNeil has written about the eternal recurrence from the perspective that it is objective cosmology for N (1.5). That position is vulnerable to the criticism that we do not find a proof of the ER in the published works but mostly in the notebooks. The exceptions are two passages from GS (109 and 341) but they are couched in metaphor. McNeil thus turns to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and states that there, in "Vision and Riddle" the metaphor of eternal recurrence is "strengthened and developed into a deductive proof" (99f)." He accepts Paul Loeb's reading that together, "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" contain a prospective memory. Z has a dying prospective memory of the shepherd and the snake that amounts to it and it shows up in fact in "The Convalescent" and this shows recurrence-awareness and so is a fictional presentation of evidence that the eternal recurrence is objective cosmology. But McNeil's attempt to establish that N intended a deductive proof of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in "Vision and Riddle" fails because the context strongly suggests otherwise, and he does not address it. Also in "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" in following Paul Loeb, McNeil would seem to assuming that, having left metaphor behind, there is only one literal reading possible. Professor McNeil's book is not recommended.
