Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
8 - … And his rational ones
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A philosophy that is not a philosophy’
- 2 Contrary states
- 3 ‘… you hear the grating roar’
- 4 The energy for war
- 5 The division of the soul
- 6 ‘Wandering between two worlds …’
- 7 Kant's aesthetic ideas
- 8 … And his rational ones
- 9 Arnold's recast religion
- 10 Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork
- 11 Erotic reformations
- 12 A language of grasping and non-grasping
- 13 ‘… sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind’
- 14 Concentration, continence and arousal
- 15 Uneasily, he retraces his steps …
- References
- Index
Summary
Nietzsche's announcement of The Death of God offers cultural rather than directly metaphysical news, but it is worth taking seriously Heidegger's (1977, 61) interesting gloss:
The suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end. Nietzsche understands his own philosophy as the countermovement to metaphysics, and that means for him a movement in opposition to Platonism.
We need to be careful how we proceed here since ‘Platonism’ isn't all one thing, there isn't a single Platonic moment, and it is any way too easy to caricature: ‘Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things’, which is succinct, but diminishes the reality of both the ‘spume’ and the ‘paradigm’ at the same time. Heidegger's remark seems apposite to Nietzsche's (1968, 40) ‘History of an Error’, to How the ‘Real World’ became a Myth, his readily received satire on the fate of Plato's supposed Two Worlds, the Real one and the Apparent one, the former our origin and goal and source of value, the latter our place of exile, our land of shadows. Once the ‘real world’ evaporates, once we lose our sense of its presence or lose our ever more tenuous faith in its possibility, we are left with only the devalued apparent world (not even that, since ‘apparent’ belongs to a distinction that has just been undermined) and terminal depression sets in (passive nihilism), unless, more actively, we can rise to a radical readjustment of our views about the nature and source of value.
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- Transformations of MindPhilosophy as Spiritual Practice, pp. 116 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000