Peter Jung

This paper offers a plausible understanding of the notion of “myth” and its systemic role in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872). This is carried out against the backdrop of interpretations that evince aporia or irony in Nietzsche’s invocation of the notion of myth, arguing that many alleged aporias arise precisely due to a lack on the part of Nietzsche to provide a sufficiently articulated account of the notion. Towards this end, it proposes that the notion of myth operates in two registers of meaning: first, “myth” as a hermeneutic structure that provides a narrative about reality; second, “Myth” as an “unconscious metaphysics” which is not a doctrinal account of reality, but a prereflective horizon and as the condition of possibility of rendering experience intelligible, distributing evaluative weight and thus essentially grounding forms of life. This distinction enables a nuanced reassessment of Nietzsche’s typology of artistic, tragic, and theoretic myths as competing axiological configurations that project their own (metaphysical) worldviews. This paper further argues that Nietzsche’s critique of Socratism targets not the falsity of its claims but rather its axiological architecture by denying the necessity of illusion and subordinating existence to theoretical justification. Thus, our paper argues that for Nietzsche, the Socratic myth undermines the conditions of affective attachment, perspectival inhabitation, and belief itself.

The mainstream approach to the understanding of pain continues to be governed by the biomedical paradigm and the dualistic Cartesian ontology. This Volume brings together essays of scholars of literature, philosophy and history on the many enigmatic shades of pain-experience, mostly from an anti-Cartesian perspective of cultural ontology by scholars of literature, philosophy and history. A section of the essays is devoted to the socio-political dimensions of pain in the Indian context. The book offers a critical perspective on the reductive conceptions of pain and argue that non-substance ontology or cultural ontology supports a more humane and authentic understanding of pain. The general ontological features of the self in pain and culturally imbued dimensions of pain-experience are, thus, brought together in a rare blend in this Volume. The essays dwell on the importance of understanding what cultural, social and political forces outside our control do to our pain-experience. They show why such understanding is necessary, both to humanely deal with pain, and to rectify erroneous approaches to pain-experience. They also explore the thoroughly ambivalent spaces between pain and pleasure, and the cathartic and productive dimensions of pain. The essays in this Volume investigate pain-experiences through the fresh lenses of history, gender, ethics, politics, death, illness, self-loss, torture, shame, dispossession and denial.

In this essay, I investigate if self-respect as Robin Dillon conceives of it in her essay “Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political” can be taught if we presuppose Barbara Herman’s theory of moral education. For Dillon, self-respect is a nonpropositionally held and emotionally forged interpretive orientation that determines one’s understanding of oneself. Further, it cannot be reconstituted through reason if it has been damaged. The claim that reason cannot remedy a lack of self-respect in persons is at odds with Herman’s reason-based training in value. I argue that we do not have sufficient grounds to think that Herman’s reason-based training in value cannot help instil Dillon-type self-respect.