Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Living in the Lie

Plato’s story continues with the prisoners mistaking the shadows for the objects themselves. They do not get to see the people and the dummies and are familiar only with the shadows. If they hear a voice or a noise in the cave, they think that these emanated from the shadows because these are the only things that are real to them. This is how we live in the lie.
Fathers wish their sons to sail into the world with their backpacks filled with all they need to survive the tests of the sea. The individual is sent away from the port of home with a confidence that he has been prepared enough to face the world, no matter what it may bring. Such an attitude is very much like the attitude of the Nietzschean Übermensch. Nietzsche says that the will to power is an intrinsic and driving force of man to overcome his environment. Hence, he saw this will to power as also the will to life. Indeed, there is much more than simply wanting to survive life. One has to conquer it if he were to be the best person he could be. The underlying attitudes of this Superhuman are his love for life and his desire to assert his lordship over it. Such attitudes allow him to assert his powers and therefore affirm himself.

The Übermensch however is not a totalitarian bully claims Stumpf and Fieser.[i] He does not assert himself by imposing himself on his environment. Rather, the Superhuman affirms himself by not allowing his environment to control him. We must remember that the Übermensch loves what is of the earth and sees it as the means for him to realize his best self, thus desiring to draw the most out of what his world has to offer. After all, Nietzsche says, “everything rare is meant for the rare.”[ii] For the Superhuman to do this, reason must guide him. The Superhuman is a man of passion guided by reason. As Nietzsche himself posits, reason must serve life and not the other way around as the Greeks believed.[iii]

The kind of life such a novice to the world lives may also be characterized by Levinasian jouissance – enjoyment. Such is possible because he is confident of his sovereignty over beings other than himself and of his freedom to dispose of them as he wishes. He brings with him a metaphysics of servitude where being – that which actually exists with its own act of existence outside of the self – does not question his supremacy; instead, it simply waits on him to allow it to meet his needs and fulfill his desires. Hence, as Davis says, “[j]ouissance names the process by which the subject makes itself at home in an environment where otherness is not a threat to be overcome, but a pleasure to be experienced.”[iv]

And so, the individual immerses himself in the world outside himself with only one aim: to enjoy it. Unknowingly however, his enjoyment is bound to end when he experiences alterity.
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[i] Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser, Socrates to Sartre and Beyond, A History of Philosophy, International Edition 2005 (Manila: McGraw-Hill Education (Asia), 2005), 388.
[ii] as quoted by Stumpf and Fieser, 387.
[iii] Ibid, 388.
[iv] Collin Davis, Levinas, An Introduction (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 43.

2 Comments:

Blogger Gina said...

Perhaps you would like to take a look at my new Nietzsche movie here:
http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/2006/01/fireside-reading.html

Hope you enjoy it.

Thursday, January 05, 2006 9:16:00 AM  
Blogger Weyms Sanchez, SJ said...

you make nietzsche movies? sure will check it out. thanks!

Thursday, January 05, 2006 9:37:00 AM  

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