Babette Babich

This work presents truth as an aesthetic value in Nietzsche's epistemic account of Western morals and scientific culture. An expression of Nietzsche's special, selective style as a deconstructive hermeneutic in and among texts and readers is offered to facilitate this reading. ;Nietzsche's claim that the world is Will to Power construes all events as mutually interpretive expressions. Where truth is determined as a perspectival expression, the Real must be thought to incorporate multiple truths reflecting its ambiguous, ambivalent abundance. ;The existing tradition in the philosophy of science takes science to approximate ideal knowledge. As an interpretive position, science takes the measure of opposing perspectives: the efficacy of theory and computation testifies to the power of the scientific project. This project has its special advantage from the dynamic difference between evaluative structures seeking to overpower disparate perspectives. As the scientific focus is claimed to be exclusive, or accurate, it is a falsification. ;Beyond the computational efficiency which requires a life-denying , preservative life-orientation, Nietzsche moves towards a broader aesthetic: affirming life in its very chaotic ambivalence. As an active Will to Power, this expressive aesthetic opposes the reactive Will to Power of the ascetic aesthetic of science and religion. This is an uneven contest, for while the Will to Power can be active or reactive, the active will becomes reactive if it once encounters and resists--neither absorbing nor succumbing to--a reactive will. Given the insistent superiority of indigent Will to Power as a conservative, acquisitive will, the full possibility of a perspectival aesthetics of truth including an affirmative aesthetic is only rarely to be realised. This affirmative aesthetic articulates a life that is neither acquisitive nor fearful but purely expressive in the grand style. Finally, assumed from the perspective of such a grand style of life, the thought of the Eternal Return is prophylactic against the deadening rule of nihilism

Nietzsche's discovery of the "breath" or spirit of music in the words of Greek tragedy was his testament to oral culture in antiquity and it is significant that his theoretical account of the prosody of ancient Greek endures to this day. Drawing little emaphatic resonance from his readers , Nietzsche reprised yet another tradition of poetic song composition, namely the art of the troubadours in order to rearticulate his argument in The Gay Science. I here explore the passion of the 'knightly art', of poetic song and explore in addition Nietzsche's conception of Wissenschaft . The art of poetry was less an antiquarian rhetorical concept than a practical guide for those of us who seek to be "the poets of our lives".Mit der Enteckung des Geistes oder 'Artems' der Musik in den Worten der grichischen Tragödie deutete Nietzsche die orale Kultur in der Antike auf eine neue Weise. Bisher wurden diese Entdeckung und ihre Konsequenzen für Verständnis der modernen Kultur aber kaum beachtet. Die Abhandlung untersuchtd Nietzsches Auffassung der 'gaya scienza' am Beispiel des Troubadours und der mit ihm verbundenen, jedoch verlorengegangenen mündlichen Tradition von poetischer oder liedhafter Komposition. Nietzsches Deutung der Leidenschaft der ritterlichen Gesangskunst wird en einen Zusammenhang mit seiner Auffassung von Wissenschaft gebracht, und diese wird mit der provençalischen scienza sowie der englischen und französischen science verglichten

Anders was a preeminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb as he saw this hermeneutico-phenomenologically in the visceral sense of beingand time: the sheer that of its having been used as well as the bland politics of nuclear proliferation functions as programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defense and deterrence. The tactic ofsheerly technological, automatic, mechanical, aggression is carried out in good conscience. The preemptive strike is, as Baudrillard observed, the opponent’s fault: such are the wages of evil. Violence in good conscience characterizes the postwar, cold war era and the present day with its mushrooming effects ofneo-fascism under the titles of national security and anti-terrorism. Karl Krauss’ 1913 bon mot regarding psychoanalysis as the very insanity it claims to cure [Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren Therapie sie sich halt] has never been more apt for political translation—straight into the heart of what Lacan called the Real which has ‘always been’ the political register. Where Habermas and heirs have tended to disregard Anders , just as most philosophers of technology have ignored the political as well as theethical in their eagerness to avoid suspicion of technophobia, we continue to require both critical theory and a critical philosophy of technology, a conjunction incorporating Ander’s complicated dialectic less of art in Benjamin’s prescient but still innocent age of technological reproduction but and much rather “on the devastation of life in the age of the third industrial revolution.” Thus rather thanreading Anders’ critique of the bomb as limited to a time we call the Atomic Age—as Anders himself varied Samuel Beckett’s 1957 Endgame asEndzeit that is “Endtime,” here invoking the eschatological language of Jacob Taubes as Anders does—this essay connects his reflections on the bomb with his critique of technology and the obsolescence of humanity as of a piece with our dedication to hurling ourselves against our own mortality. This concern with the violence of technology, this hatred of the vulnerability of having been born and having been set on a path unto death inspires Anders’ engagement with the sons of Eichmann—the heirs of those who designed and executed the Nazi death camps and extermination chambers of the Holocaust—and the sons of Claude Eatherly—the heirs ofboth those who designed and those who as pilots deployed the bombings that exploded nothing the stuff of the sun itself against the Empire of the Sun in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, embroiled as we are in wartime after wartime, suppressing public protest on a scale like never before, in country after country across the globe, cannot dispense with Anders today