The Given: Passion
Day three of recovery from covid. I am feeling somewhat better. I decided to attempt to mow the lawn. There is no doubt that being 75 years of age in combination with covid made the task a challenge. The passage of time. Nothing is absolved from the eroding effects of time. Clearly this varies somewhat person to person, but the end is, well the end, for everyone of us. Death, the ultimate leveler. Prince and pauper return to the same earth from which they came.
Wondering what to post today, I came upon this passage as I worked my way through selections culled by R. J. Hollingdale from the full range of Nietzsche’s published works. This insight is explosive with implied consequences. Nietzsche states our constantly changing affective states, the reaction of our organism to impinging stimuli is the only basis for “reality” that is available to us. Our drives, the felt urges of my body channeling my thought process, are the rails if you will for reason. Thinking is a dance seeming to rise up, clear and distinct from inchoate emotion… At ground zero, at the beginning, the “given” is only emotion. But what if, not only the fluctuating emotion-of-the-self which I know intimately, but the entirety of the physical world is no different!?
Everything a dance of affects, effect impacting effect. Suppose this is the root of causation? All matter a rudimentary (more basic) rendition of a being such as I happen to be? Nietzsche labels this indescribable confluence of forces all competing, collaborating, organizing, as “will to power and nothing else.”
Assuming that our world of desires and passions
is the only thing “given” as real,
that we cannot get down or up to any “reality”
except the reality of our drives
(since thinking is only a relation between these drives)
– aren’t we allowed to make the attempt
and pose the question as to whether something like this “given”
isn’t enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material)
world comprehensible as well? …
I mean it might allow us to understand
the so-called mechanical (or ‘material’ world)
as belonging to the same plane of reality
as our affects themselves –,
as a primitive form of the world of affect,
where everything is contained in a powerful unity
before branching off
and organizing itself in the organic process…
The world seen from inside,
the world determined and described
with respect to its
“intelligible character”
– would be just this “will to power”
and nothing else. –
Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 36
