Animals Sick with Language: From Syntax to Socialism in Nietzsche

Abstract

I will begin below with a brief survey of Nietzsche's 'system', his philosophy of mind and language, before progressing to forms of ideological terrain that appear to be interrelated with his fundamental beliefs about the structure of reality. I will conclude in a standardly Nietzschean way -by not really concluding at all. EverythingEverywhere All At Once: Or, 'All Things Are Enchained, Entwined, Enamored' 'I hated childhood I hate adulthood And I love being alive.' Mary Ruefle, "Provenance", Trances of the BlastMuch of Nietzsche's thought approaches the notion that reality is a unitary entity. He is a monist in the tradition of Spinoza, Parmenides, Eddington and modern cosmology (space-time monism). Nietzsche was a clear metaphysical non-dualist 5 . Reality is ultimately relational; a world without terms; to be is to be 'becoming', ever-evolving.He holds that everything is will to power, but that, in a sense, everything is mental.Mentality for Nietzsche is closely identified with this will. As Abel 6 discusses, instead of naturalizing the external world and spiritualizing the mental, Nietzsche provides a profound inversion: he spiritualizes the natural world but naturalizes mentality, leading to a form of panpsychism 7 . If everything is will to power, then reality is suffused with mentality (in some form). He proposes the view that 'in all events a will to power is operating' over standard mechanical accounts of physics 8 . Nietzsche can be read as a perspectivist, deeply sceptical of the concept of truth, and was famously sceptical about the whole project of metaphysics and traditional speculations about supra-sensible entities as Platonic forms, and Kantian things-in-5 Ibid. 6 G.