Nietzsche

The other half of this chapter for Rorty is about Nietzsche, and these days whenever I come across the name, I think that there can’t possibly be anything new or interesting for me to write about him. Too many writers and philosophers are obsessed with him and at times that has included me.

But I came across a passage in one of his earlier books—Daybreak— that actually made me reconsider something important about him and some of the other projects I’ve been working on. Nietzsche has very interesting things to say about language throughout his body of work. The literary critic Harold Bloom was especially drawn to his aphorism that “in all talk there is a grain of contempt.” I have always interpreted this line to mean that words never fully express our full intense feelings, similar to the line of verse from Petrarch Montaigne liked to quote, that any love that can be expressed burns on a small pyre.

But in Daybreak, Nietzsche says something more subtle:

Language and the prejudices upon which language is based are a manifold hindrance to us when we want to explain inner processes and drives: because of the fact, for example, that words really exist only for superlative degrees of these processes and drives; and where words are lacking, we are accustomed to abandon exact observation because exact thinking there becomes painful.

What Nietzsche is saying here is that the problem with words, and the concepts around them, isn’t that they express too little, they conflate emotions. He elaborates (lengthy, but worth it:)

Anger, hatred, love, pity, desire, knowledge, joy, pain – all are names for extreme states: the milder, middle degrees, not to speak of the lower degrees which are continually in play, elude us, and yet it is they which weave the web of our character and our destiny. These extreme outbursts – and even the most moderate conscious pleasure or displeasure, while eating food or hearing a note, is perhaps, rightly understood, an extreme outburst – very often rend the web apart, and then they constitute violent exceptions, no doubt usually consequent on built-up congestions: – and, as such, how easy it is for them to mislead the observer! No less easy than it is for them to mislead the person in whom they occur. We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves, we draw a conclusion on the basis of data in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called `ego’, is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny.

In other words, it’s the extremism of our vocabularies that confuse us, make us believe we are experiencing something stronger than it really is. And I believe this is especially true in our culture where we are constantly being bombarded with provocation—be outraged by this, make this sandwich your next obsession, etc.

So it’s no surprise that we have so much difficulty fully understanding ourselves and our moods and often feel in a state of whiplash. Our vocabularies are making us extremists about ourselves. All of us are actually far more moderate in our beliefs and opinions than how we voice our feelings.

To make matters worse, our culture puts a premium on this kind of extreme expression and stigmatizes those who hold back from revealing them. Nietzsche would tell us that we should actually admire the people who aren’t revealing everything and anything.

Slovenian philosopher Slavov Zizek said something similar recently: he would prefer to live in a culture where people did wherever they wanted but expressed nothing.