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As a Nietzschean, I've been steeped in a courageous philosophy that celebrates the idea of living dangerously. And so, for me, there's nothing more insulting than being instructed by someone in a mask to stay safe.
Not only does such willingness to parrot the government's Covid-19 propaganda display their own cowardice and conformity, it offends the libertarian and Clash City Rocker in me who prefers to stay free above all else and affirm the fact that risk is a crucial component of being.
For those who might not be familiar with Section 283 in Book IV of The Gay Science where Nietzsche advances his idea of gefährlich leben, here are the crucial lines:
"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!"
Although, as Walter Kaufmann notes, this magnificent formulation is found only here in Nietzsche's works, it is one of his most memorable motifs and, arguably, is as central to his philosophy as major concepts such as the overman and eternal recurrence.
I've no idea how long the coronavirus pandemic will last, but I'm hoping that the time will soon be past when people were content to live socially distanced from one another, hidden behind masks, and obsessed with health and safety to the detriment of everything else.
Although, as Walter Kaufmann notes, this magnificent formulation is found only here in Nietzsche's works, it is one of his most memorable motifs and, arguably, is as central to his philosophy as major concepts such as the overman and eternal recurrence.
I've no idea how long the coronavirus pandemic will last, but I'm hoping that the time will soon be past when people were content to live socially distanced from one another, hidden behind masks, and obsessed with health and safety to the detriment of everything else.
See: Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV: 283, p. 228-29.
The libertarian/Romantic individualist in me is natuerlich broadly sympathetic. Living dangerously - and, for me, Nietzsche is pointing here to the virtue and value of self-contestation/critique ('live at war with your peers AND yourselves') as the acme of the will to truth - means essentially opening oneself to the instability of life and psyche and cleaving to explosive ground. This engenders complexity, if not irony, as the subsoil of the self becomes an abyss, as Freud foresaw.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, for Romantics, rebels, Nietzscheans and Peter Hitchensians (and it's important to point out that every attempt to cloak oneself in the thought of another is precisely to do violence to Nietzsche's essential appeal - just as Jung said there were and could be no Jungians apart from himself, Nietzsche echoed a similar disdain for disciples), the famous anarchist statement that 'my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins' is directly mappable onto Covid/viral culture. In a nutshell, if/when my breathing could be lethal to you, I may need to keep a little more of it in - doing otherwise would be indecent, to say the least.
So, it's all very well for me to rock around unshielded/ unmuzzled as my instincts may compel me to do, but if I'm contagious (which itself might well be unknown to me, given this virus's apparent propensity for asymtomatic infection), my partner or child or mother or lover could well be Covid-on-toast if I breathe on him/her the wrong way - assuming, as seems plausible, face coverings do inhibit transmission at least to some degree.
My desire to 'live dangerously' - however compelling - shoudn't condemn you to the same commitment. The interpersonality of air - neither yours, nor mine, but the zone of our intermingling - makes it so.
That said, the Hitchenite Lord Sumption is of course right to say life cannot just mean 'bare life', much as (with due deference to the Bee Gees) 'stayin' alive' does tend to be a transcendental condtion of being interestingly alive.
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