Nietzsche & Subjectivity

Collection: The Beat Philosopher

Cross-Post: The Modern Existentialist Project

Format: Philosophy Discussion

Author: Melissa Nadia Viviana

Date: November 24, 2024

Tags: Fascism, Tech Overlords, Boycotts, Consumer Ethics

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“But you’re a philosopher” I hear some people thinking.

I’m with Nietzsche on this one:

It’s only those who see subjectivity as an enemy - rather than an inevitability - who will try to belittle the subjective filter that exists in all intelligent human beings.

Nietzsche was one of the few philosophers of his century willing to ignore the claims of objectivity from academic peers.

He wrote:

“Gradually, it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

Also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

He wasn’t the first to see subjectivity behind philosophers’ intentions. Nietzsche also wrote:

How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. That means literally–– “flatterers of Dionysius.”

[A Sicilian tyrant whom Plato had tried for several years to convert to his own philosophy].

In other words, tyrant’s baggage and lickspittles.

In addition, he also wants to say, “They are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them.” For Dionysokolax was a popular name for an actor.

And the latter is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato. He was peeved by the grandiose manner, the mise en scène (staging) at which Plato and his disciples were so expert.

At which Epicurus was not an expert––he, that old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat, hidden away, in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books––who knows?––perhaps from rage and ambition against Plato.

It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god, Epicurus, had been.––Did they find out?––

Nietzsche didn’t run away from his own flaws, his own subjectivity. He found transparency to be the best method in philosophical discourse.

Similarly, from my first philosophy class in college, I knew (against the premise that was being taught to us) that subjectivity was not my weakness. It was my inevitability.

The inevitability that we all possess.

In order to be transparent and honest about what we think: we have to embrace the inevitability of who we are.

Rather than perform for others and create what Nietzsche called the “grandiose manner––the staging at which Plato and his disciples were so expert.”