The Nietzsche of New England

Henry Thoreau was a vigorous, good-natured rebel. He repudiated not only the Puritan conscience but the transcendental conscience as well and gave expression to paganism as a principle of self-culture. He was the Nietzsche of New England. His doctrine of "civil disobedience" was merely the conscientious and philosophical justification of his wholehearted scorn for society, especially his society. He discovered a critical, practical scheme for private rebellion. It was not that he loved nature more, but that he found his spirit (i.e., his reflections on reading) to be freer in solitude and open air. He was not a naturalist except incidentally; he was a poet who felt no need for institutional morals...But his religious and moral rebellion is very unlike Nietzsche's paganism in that it is genial, unpretentious, and pious...If we may be guided by his Journal, we must picture him as becoming what the orientals [sic] call a "forest ascetic" writing "forest treatises"...This absorption into nature was not a Spinozistic worship of the order in nature or a love of observing natural creatures and processes, but a sense of the endlessness of the life in which man participates. Thoreau could as spontaneously merge himself in nature as Whitman could in Brooklyn.

--Herbert Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 2nd edition, New York: Columbia University Press (1963), 251-255.

Voltaire As Nietzschean Exemplar

"Nietzschean free spirits are not necessarily philosophers; but Nietzschean philosophers are necessarily free spirits. Voltaire, for Nietzsche, was an exemplary free spirit, as the original dedication of Human, All Too Human indicated...The 'free spirit' is 'a spirit that has become free' as Nietzsche emphasizes in his remarks on Human, All Too Human in Ecce Homo...True freedom of the spirit is something that is acquired--if at all--with difficulty, and only by a few."

--from Richard Schacht's Introduction to Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (Cambridge University Press edition, 1996, p. xxi).

Richard Rorty At His Best

"Being that can be understood is language"--from the LRB vol. 22, no. 6 (March 16, 2000), 23-25.

Even So, Read Nietzsche

One cannot read Nietzsche without experiencing occasional episodes of deep revulsion. Even so, read Nietzsche. He is indispensable. In his polemical "unfashionable observation" on philosophical genius ("Schopenhauer As Educator"), Nietzsche quoted Emerson, ostensibly about Schopenhauer, but undoubtedly, and justly, about himself:

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits."

Myth and History in the Bible

Giovanni Garbini is a distinguished Italian scholar of the Hebrew Bible. His approach to ancient Near Eastern scripture is, in my view, the most sound of those presently "on the market." In the Forward to his 2003 collection of essays Myth and History in the Bible, Garbini wrote: "Though the Old Testament [sic] apparently offers a distinction between facts that are considered mythical and facts that should be considered historical, in reality the only historical thing in the Bible is the Bible itself, a superb product of Jewish thought. What is narrated in the Bible is only myth...[b]ut this myth about Israel's past...was built also with fragments of history, or rather with written traditions that were different from those expressed in the actual text, and obviously more ancient" (p. vii).

In the book's first essay, "The Myths of the Origins of Israel", Garbini distinguishes between "origins" (which he says are "always somehow mythological") and "beginnings," which are the concern of historiography. In the case of the people (Garbini uses the term "concept") "Israel," the historian of the ANE must undertake an explicitly twofold task: to investigate "origins" (on the one hand) and "beginnings" (on the other), and to have the discipline to know the difference and to keep the two issues separate (p. 1). In the particular essay that opens the book, Garbini dedicates himself to the task of "determining how (and when) Israel created its own origins" (ibid). What follows is a tour de force of careful Biblical scholarship that focuses upon the aporias in the Biblical narrative and, in so doing, exposes to view the seams in the text--where myths (which function like tribal totems and represent rival factions among the Canaanite sodalities who co-imagined Israelite origins) collide.

In the Hexateuch, Garbini identifies three main characters of the myths of the origins of Israel: Abraham (the "founder" of the people), Moses (the "founder" of the cult), and Joshua (the "founder" of the land)--and notes, among others, the significant aporia of Jacob/Israel's "ringing absence" (p. 2). He also reminds the reader of the geographic locations associated with Moses (Egypt) and Abraham (Mesopotamia) and proceeds to trace the significance of these places for the contending factions responsible for the composition of the myths of Israel's origins: Jerusalem priests and Egyptian Jews (p. 6). He then considers the third character of the origins myths, Joshua, in light of the lack of historical evidence for the conquest of Canaan, and asks what mythological function this character played in the Hebraic religious imagination (p. 7).

The importance of Garbini's scholarship for Scriptural studies lies in the way in which he returns the Scriptures to literature: he is not interested in contributing to the Bible as literature genre but, rather, to the recognition that the Bible is literature--first and foremost. "In reality the Bible does not represent Hebrew people nor Hebrew culture, but only the point of view of a small minority of individuals who, at a certain moment quite late in Hebrew history wanted to express their ideology in a certain number of books." And it was only at an even later moment in history, he tells us, that those books were "imposed as normative and as such preserved from the destruction which attended all the others" (p. 1). Great literature does not enter the world as Scripture: it can become Scripture over time as its ideological function acquires normative force for an ever-widening audience of readers and/or auditors.

Moreover, Garbini's scholarship honors the distinction imposed by Chekhov on every author: what is required is the correct formulation of questions as opposed to the provision of definitive answers (see Richard Pevear's Introduction to Stories by Anton Chekhov (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. xii). "As I often repeat to my students," Garbini acknowledges in his Forward to Myth and History, "'the Bible is right'; 'but', I add, 'biblical scholars are almost always wrong'" (p. vii).

Whichever Way You Turn, There Is Nietzsche

"The last thing in metaphysics we'll rid ourselves of is the oldest stock, assuming we can rid ourselves of it--that stock which has embodied itself in language and the grammatical categories and made itself so indispensable that it almost seems we would cease being able to think if we relinquished it. Philosophers, in particular, have the greatest difficulty in freeing themselves from the belief that the basic concepts and categories of reason belong without further ado to the realm of metaphysical certainties: from ancient times they have believed in reason as a piece of the metaphysical world itself--this oldest belief breaks out in them again and again like an overpowering recoil."

--F. Nietzsche, Notebook 6, summer 1886-spring 1887.

Modern Problems

A wonderful nugget (one of many) from Louis Menand's brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed "story of ideas in America":

"Since the defining characteristic of modern life is social change--not onward or upward, but forward, and toward a future always in the making--the problem of legitimacy continually arises. In a premodern society, legitimacy rests with hereditary authority and tradition; in a modernizing society...legitimacy tends to be transferred from leaders and customs to nature. [Some moderns have] assumed that social arrangements are justified if they correspond with the design of the natural world...[b]ut in societies bent on transforming the past, and on treating nature itself as a process of ceaseless transformation, how do we trust the claim that a particular state of affairs is legitimate? The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science" (Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, New York: F,S & G, (2001), 431-432).