Alan Watt

Spinoza’s Ethics must contain some of philosophy’s most baffling statements. All things are animate; the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things: what would I be committed to in agreeing with these doctrines? His austere mode of exposition, sparing of illustrations and discursive explanations, ensures that any answer must be highly speculative.His weakness for dark sayings seems to have communicated itself to some of his best-known commentators. Of course where a philosopher’s thought is itself opaque one would be unreasonable to expect lucidity in a commentator’s exposition of it. However he has been described as holding puzzling, to my mind unintelligible opinions on subjects concerning which, as far as I can see, his own statements more naturally suggest a much clearer and more comprehensible interpretation. There are problems enough in understanding his thought without adding needlessly to the list. I think there has been such an addition in discussion of his doctrines about the causal relationship between God and finite creatures, and this paper is devoted to suggesting another account of his thought on that topic which combines, I think, the advantages of being more intelligible and a more natural construction to place on his own statements, than the set of opinions generally laid at his door.

This chapter approaches Nietzsche’s politics through the thought of Jacques Rancière. To help us resolve the recurring question of whether Nietzsche is a political thinker we should also ask “what is politics?”, and Rancière’s novel answer to the latter question allows a new way of affirming the political relevance of Nietzsche’s thought. Much of what is conventionally understood as politics is re-framed by Rancière as ‘the police’, his term for any order which puts all social actors in their supposedly ‘proper place’. Politics, on the other hand, takes place when the order is challenged by those who claim they are not properly counted, and is thus a radical form of dispute. Nietzsche, I claim, outlines just such a ‘different count’ in GM I, since the slave revolt in morality renames the parties and challenges the aristocratic count.

In this chapter, I attempt a reading of Bataille on Nietzsche and religion, concentrating in particular on Inner Experience, and consider how Bataille’s approach contrasts with other ‘religious’ readings of Nietzsche. Bataille, first, understands ‘God is dead’ in terms of sacrifice-we kill him and want to kill him (‘Dieu soit mort’)-which immediately gives it a religious character.Whereas many religious readings of Nietzsche have been upbeat, bringers of glad tidings about ‘affirmation and grace’ (Altizer) or an ‘elemental Yes’ (Roberts), Bataille’s God-sacrificer is anguished: trembling, laughter, even megalomania and madness are likely accompaniments of the sacrifice. For Bataille, sacred life involves the inescapable laceration of individual integrity. After completing a presentation of Bataille’s sense of God-be-dead experience, I turn to the question of how Nietzschean all this is. After all, Bataille himself never posed as a ‘true exegete’. Yet although one can hardly ‘demonstrate the correctness’ of his way of reading Nietzsche, there are important resonances, notably in The Madman, Zarathustra’s Prologue, and in aspects of Nietzsche’s figuring of Dionysus, that in my view make Bataille’s ‘dice-throw’ still a luckier hit than many ostensibly more careful readings.

The thesis maintained here is that Nietzsche belongs to and revitalizes a rhetorical tradition which has competed with philosophy for cultural and educational dominance. The general strategy of the thesis is to draw comparisons between Nietzsche and those aspects of the Sophists' activity that were attacked by Plato, in order to challenge philosophy's claim to moral and intellectual superiority over rhetoric. The first chapter considers the allegation that philosophy is demonstrably superior to rhetoric because it has a proper method and can achieve positive results. Against this, it is argued that philosophy is distinguished from rhetoric by its values, not its methodological purity; the remaining chapters probe this conflict of values. Chapter two explores the charge that rhetoric is both manipulative and open to manipulation, notes how Nietzsche's texts have been subject to these two criticisms, and counters them by challenging philosophy's models of manipulation and education. Chapter three examines the rival educational ideals of philosophy and rhetoric, arguing that the key differentiating feature is rhetoric's pragmatism. It shows how this feature has been used to disparage rhetoric, and argues that Nietzsche develops a form of pragmatism that meets the philosophical attack effectively. Chapter four considers the suggestion that rhetoric is less rational than philosophy because it employs looser argumentation, and argues that, at least as manifested by Nietzsche, rhetorical argumentation produces a superior rationality - according to an alternative perspective on reason and science. Chapter five considers the claim that the eloquence of rhetoric is to be condemned for seducing and confusing the seeker after truth; this is countered by developing the Nietzschean dictum that art is worth more than truth. The main conclusion is that, through Nietzsche's development of the ancient tradition, rhetoric emerges as a real alternative "love of wisdom"