FUCK THEORY
Experiments in visceral philosophy.
Nietzsche 102, or, Three Notions of Conceptual Value, Pt. I
(“Die Falschheit eines Urtheils ist uns noch kein Einwand gegen ein Urtheil…Die Frage ist, wie weit es lebensfördernd, lebenerhaltend, Art-erhaltend, vielleicht gar Art-züchtend ist.” Jenseits von Gut und Böse, dtv, p. 18. My translation.)
If the deconstruction of “truth” does not necessarily mean that all ideas are equally valid (click for yesterday’s post), what determines the value of an idea? I want to spend a couple of posts trying to summarize the Nietzschean, Spinozan, and Deleuzian answer to the question.
Nietzsche’s answer more or less sums itself up: as in Spinoza and Deleuze, the question is not “Is this idea true?” but rather, “What does this idea do?” It’s a question of activity, and by extension of production, proliferation and generation. “Species” is here an unsatisfying translation of the German “Art,” which also implies “kind,” “sort,” or “variety”; it would be a mistake to read this quote as Nietzschean eco-criticism.
